


Schadenfreude

by XIX



Category: Original Work
Genre: 19, Abuse of Authority, Auschwitz, Concentration Camps, Gay, Gay Male Character, Homophobia, Homosexuality, M/M, Nazi, Nazis, Period Typical Homophobia, Rape, Rape/Non-con Elements, Schadenfreude, Third Reich, Torture, World War II, XIX, Yaoi, gay male - Freeform, period typical homosexuality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 13:59:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1032510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XIX/pseuds/XIX
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erich Kass has a safe gray life in Berlin until he is arrested by the Gestapo for kissing another boy. The Hell he finds in Auschwitz as the property of Dr. Ahren Kaltherzig will destroy everything he thinks he knows about life and safety.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One of Two

**Kindheit**

 

Twice in his life, Erich saw his father cry. 

The first time was when he was six. 

His father was sitting at the kitchen table with the radio on. There was a great deal of drums-and-trumpets fanfare, the crowd roaring like a lion. The announcer was very excited, saying _Hitler_ and _chancellor_ and _German people_ as if someone had won something. 

His father had tears flowing down his face. His eyes were closed. He shook as if he felt cold. His mother kept saying _hush, somebody might hear._

Jungenvolk. They sang. They did organized clumsy exercises. There were other children his own age, some of whom even did him the courtesy of playing with him. 

Sometimes they stood fidgeting while a counselor or a visiting Hitler Youth boy talked to them about the Fatherland. The speech was just something you had to wait through, before you could eat or have races or swim.

Once they went camping.

An older boy pulled him close in the dark and kissed him on the lips. It had made his skin feel busy, his tongue feel funny. His heart pounded for a long time afterward, like he'd been running. He was eight. All he understood, of any of it, of was that it was fun. 

He never told anyone about the kiss. 

At first he was enough like the other boys to escape much notice.

He was the smallest, and never got to be the general or the head of the pack of outlaws. He was always the prisoner wound with skipping-ropes, the Indian taken captive with wooden guns and tin swords. They found it useful that he didn't mind spending most of the game being pushed into imaginary jail cells. 

He found himself thinking of those prisoner games, later, while their rumors grew louder. He remembered the strange hypnotic stillness of it, the internal quiet it gave him to imagine so loudly that he was doomed and unable to do anything to save himself. 

He never told anyone this, either. It was secret, he was sure of it. 

 

He could not take his eyes off other boys' hands. This got him in trouble in school, since it was indistinguishable from looking at the boy's paper. His sterling record bought him off with a "Mind your own assignments, then!" that left him crimson for the rest of the class. 

 

More of that prisoner game. 

He lay awake thinking of the new men in black you saw on the street sometimes, the ones who seemed to travel in a cloud of winter, wearing all the faces behind desks that had ever meant you harm. The danger of change, and usually for the worse.

He collected the rumors, of Gestapo and the more sinister prison camps, to add to this loop of thoughts in the dark.

He didn't believe them, of course. 

They'd never actually _do_ those things. 

But there was something irresistible about it.

He loved the blazing flash and fanfare of the largest rallies and Party events in the center of Berlin. The first time Erich been small enough to sit on his father's shoulders. Music, and thousands of feet shaking the earth in perfect time, so far away, an entire army gleaming in red and black and brown, flawless. It went on and on past them, so loud that it seemed there was silence, a seamless blur of shoulder-boards and gleaming guns, the claustrophobic terror of an unstoppable army of Persons in Authority.

That was delightful the way anything boisterous and proud was, just the sheer exuberance of it all. He was proud too. It seemed a brave and dangerous thing to be a German, instead of a vaguely shameful thing as it had been since The War.

The camps were different.

Sometimes there were trucks, and sometimes there was commotion at night. And sometimes there were murmurs on the street between people who would not look at one another, about people who went to the camps and did not write, and did not return.

People like Erich didn't have to worry about the camps. He had a good family, he'd done well in school. He'd never been in any kind of trouble to speak of. He had no political loyalty except a warm and general one towards the Nazi party. The labor camps were for the antisocial, for political criminals, for dope fiends and revolutionaries, anarchists and communists. Undesirables. The Reich was wise and strong, and rather than leave enemies to take root, or waste their time and talent in unproductive prisons, they had chosen the best solution for the Fatherland. 

That was all it was. A solution to a problem that had nothing to do with him. It was nothing to worry about, nothing to lose sleep over, as his mother would say, but lose sleep he did. Night after night. 

He thought of the camps the way he'd thought obsessively of the Inquisition. A brief taste of that chapter of history had led him to the library, and his curiosity had turned against him two books later. He'd had nightmares of the Iron Maiden closing around him, the rack rending him into pieces--but even worse than the dreams were the bewildering erections that followed. 

Now he shuddered over what the new dungeons must be like. There were no books to make him sorry he'd wondered. He was left to the mercy of imagination and rumor.

 

**Die Erbsünde**

 

Erich graduated from school with all sorts of irritating honors. He endured a party or three, received books and a billfold and money and clothes that didn't suit him. He was grateful to escape the gymnasium. School had begun with games that he was terrible at and ended with classes that were much too easy filled with other boys that hated him. Hiding in the library gave him plenty of time to study, and he spent the rest of it immersed in books, so many that his teachers noticed, and special credits in German and literature were noted on his record.

His father arranged for him to apprentice in a print shop. He suggested first a newspaper, but Erich was wide-eyed and apprehensive about one day being expected to _write_ something others would read. He was at his best when his task required an eye for symmetry and exactitude. Questions that had more than one right answer drove him mad. Creativity was dangerous—he needed rules, so that he might know how to escape notice. 

The print shop suggestion was given to him to ponder for a night or two, and he felt as comfortable with this idea as he supposed he would with any.

His mother made disapproving faces. She wanted him to be a tailor and carry on the family business. Dinner became less edible for a while, and his mother was still and uncommunicative in a way that would have gotten Erich accused of sulking.

 

He slept for one fitful hour the night before his first day. He would do everything wrong and his mother would make him work in his father's boutique. He would spend eight hours sweeping, at the mercy of boys like the ones he'd escaped for these few short holiday weeks. A dozen other tiny fears.

To his delight he found that everyone seemed to use the manners his mother had drilled into him, and that once he demonstrated he could carry out a task he was left alone. Nobody shouted at him. He ate lunch by himself with a book spread open across his knees, absolutely luxuriating in the peace and quiet. 

So Erich spent his days learning to set type, running errands, coming home with ink ground into his hands.

 

There was a boy in the print shop who watched him with something like hunger. There had been no boys like that since that hazy distant kiss in the dark. 

He couldn't help it. His traitor eyes wandered all by themselves, leaving his hands to fumble with letters, to stumble into inkpots, to hold a broom still with dust settling around him. 

He memorized this russet tangle of hair, and the most wonderful hands he had ever stolen in long hungry stares—hands wider than his own, with long narrow fingers clever enough to set type so small it confounded the other workers. After a while Erich could recognize the black whorls of fingerprints the boy left on tabletops. 

He thought of him far too often.

 

His father brought home armloads of black and silver, and made SS uniforms far into the night, drinking coffee, his eyes rimmed in red, glasses gleaming. His father wore a swastika-pin edged in gold on his lapel, and when he put his overcoat on he took it off and put it that lapel, instead, so it was still visible.

The money was very good for the first time since the war. They bought a second radio, and a phonograph player.

Erich shook out the tunic of one of these uniforms, almost finished, bristling with pins at the collar. He held it in up to himself in the mirror, drawn by the stark lines, the dangerous glitter. He put it on, with careful gestures of his shoulders, straightened an imaginary tie. The arms hung a foot past his hands. 

His mother screamed when she found him. She swung at him with the dust-rag she was holding, shouting _get it off!_

He flailed at himself in confusion, as if he were on fire. When he realized it was the uniform she meant he bent his arms back and let it drop to the floor. A pin dragged along the underneath of his jaw.

She went to her knees, picking up the jacket, hands searching it for wounds. 

She didn't speak to him for hours. It made him sick and sad. He wasn't sure what he'd done so wrong.

 

The boy was the print shop owner's nephew. Emil. 

Learning his name had made it worse; before, he had been _the boy, that boy,_ hardly a noun at all, a vague subject that preoccupied him when he was walking home, a shape and a set of scents that kept him awake at night. 

Emil and Erich often stayed late at the shop, after the fat squinting Muench and the counter-girl had left. Orders got quite far ahead of what they could produce during business hours. So he and Emil stood for an hour or three, alone, printing poster after poster with a Nazi soldier in the bucket-style helmet, a Teutonic warrior in medieval halberd ghosted behind him. The money here, too, was good. 

Erich was clipping these prints up to dry when Emil's hands closed over his. The boy turned him around and kissed him. This was longer than that kiss in the dark, a strange hot melting, like their mouths were wounds that wanted to heal together. It still made his skin feel busy. He could not tell their tongues apart anymore, to know if his felt funny or not.

He let it go on for much too long. A tiny noise happened in his throat. He heard his mother saying _hush, somebody might hear._

He ducked his head away, slid sideways with his back against the edge of the table. "I'm not like that."

He knew it was a lie, and that he was exactly like that. 

He thought of adding _I'm sorry._ His eyes fell on another poster, a thick round blonde-and-blue German woman, crowded close on every side with thick round blonde-and-blue German children. An apple-cheeked baby was cradled to her heavy breast. 

Emil stepped back, heels clicking angry on the floor. His eyes narrowed. He said nothing at all. 

The next day at work they didn't look at each other. 

 

In public people talked of nothing. The weather. 

Everyone was so very, very careful. 

Everywhere there were constant whispers about the Police. 

The arrests went from distant-city rumor to wide-eyed cautionary tales over tea. His mother's bridge group spoke of nothing else. A nephew arrested, staggering home two days later bankrupt and bruised. The first stories that started with _you know I heard the Jews..._ and the nods, and nobody daring to disagree. 

Erich listened to these ghost stories, standing out of sight in the kitchen. He was searching for himself, he knew, in these lists of people the Police were hauling away.

He knew a few Jews, shopkeepers and the jeweler his mother preferred to visit, but none very well. His teachers had never much gotten beyond explaining them as the enemy. They had a funny way of dressing themselves, but so did Arabs and Chinese. They didn't look particularly dirty, and Mr. Kleinfeld at the jeweler's was always making his mother smile. He had the same general impression of Jews he did of Bolsheviks and Communists—that there was something bad about them, though he could never understand what. 

What scared him the most was, "And of course, you know, People Like That," followed by just that silence that meant the women were nodding.

People like that. People like him.

It was such a disgusting thing to have wrong with you there wasn't even a polite word for it, he supposed. 

"It's nothing to worry us," someone would remind them all, after too much of this gloom. "We're nothing like that."

 

**Das A und O**

 

The knock on the door was what he had always expected, thudding through the house and springing his eyes open. The dreams started that way. He'd had plenty of practice. He stood up weak as water and started getting dressed. 

Downstairs, his father opened the door with pins in his mouth, one arm draped with black and silver.

 

There was none of the wanton destruction he had expected. It was all quite civil. The police sat at the dining room table, graygreen and gleaming, all creases and polish. One of them smoked a cigarette, tapping ashes into an ashtray. They stared at everything, the furniture, the paintings on the walls, his mother's curio cabinet with the little carved clocks.

Papers were produced and signed. His mother stood stunned in her bathrobe staring into the middle distance. Once she offered coffee to no one in particular. Nobody answered her. 

His father managed to be coherent and correct, though he couldn't speak in anything near as loud as even his normal mumble. The policeman with the clipboard had to lean inches from his mouth to hear him. He kept pushing up his glasses, even when they didn't need it.

Erich stood dressed, his coat on but unbuttoned, heart slamming so hard it was like the rest of the sound in the room was, underwater. 

He both wanted to cry and wanted not to cry, with a desperate debilitating want. He wanted to look at himself in the mirror, and didn't dare. He wanted _not_ to go with these men, and his knees threatened to fold at the thought that he would have to.

It was a very long time before anyone seemed to notice him.

They flanked him through the front door, and his mother made some kind of a sound behind them, and that was all. They cuffed his hands behind his back, with no particular animosity, and escorted him to a black car. One of them sat in the back seat beside him. The other started the car, and backed out onto the street. One glimpse through the windowpane, and his father, standing on the front steps. 

That was the last time Erich ever saw him cry. 

 

On the ground floor it was still a police station, and not the dungeon he had expected. There were rows of desks and typewriters, offices behind clear glass and offices behind blinds. It felt very important and very busy. There was a slaughterhouse sense of organized panic. Erich sat on a long bench in a hallway with his hands still cuffed, being ignored. People walked back and forth carrying tea and coffee and paperwork and guns and uniform caps, some of them laughing, some furious. 

A different policeman collected him and made him sit in front of one of a dozen desks in a long busy room. The policeman stood just behind him, just by his left shoulder, half-shouting questions that had become so by rote they were almost incomprehensible. A woman typed his answers without ever raising her eyes from the keyboard. 

He gave his name, address, and place of employment, his parents' names and occupations. He was photographed. He shook continually, so terrified it was like the entire world had been moved ten feet farther from him, divided from him by a blinding sheet of white panic.

You were supposed to hear about Them having the boy who used to work in the bakery, or your friend who moved the summer before, or a basement full of Bolshevik state-traitors. Not you. 

They were never supposed to have _you._

He wondered if anything his parents could do would do any good. He wondered if they would even try. He wondered if the same thing that kept his father's swastika pin visible had merely sent them back to bed.

None of it was anything like he had imagined. That seemed unfair, that he'd been forced to spend so many hours, fearing this, and all that preparation was useless now. 

He kept listening for screams. He heard only typewriters, voices at polite office levels most of the time. Doors opening and closing. His attention kept wandering to what he was guilty of, and the panic kept dragging him away from it. He really only had one sin, one crime, one secret in all his life, and surely they couldn't know _that?_

They brought him down a set of stairs. He was thumped to a halt in a less official hallway, with bricks instead of plaster and one side lined in bars. 

It was much darker down here. 

There were two cells. The first was empty. The second had four men already in it. The guard opened that door, uncuffed Erich's hands, and let him step inside. 

The door shut behind him, locked with a clank that made him think of castles and dungeons.

 

One man still had on a tie, but only an undershirt beneath it and no coat. One had on pajamas, with a suitcoat buttoned crooked over it. Two were quietly talking, sitting with their backs to the bars. 

None of them seemed particularly, dangerous. Thank God for that.

He sat down in the least-occupied section of a long wooden bench, wrapped his arms around his legs, thought of nothing. 

The man in the tie was squinting at him. "Good evening."

Erich dutifully said, "Good evening, sir," and sat still staring, out through the bars. He would be polite, to everyone, he would do whatever he was told, he would pray, and he might just be all right. That was the plan, so far. He hadn't known it was possible to be this terrified. He thought his teeth might chatter with it.

"I think I know, you, yes...you're that tailor's boy. I'm Schiffer, I taught third year at your school, but I never had you. Had your cousin, I think..." 

Schiffer sat down beside Erich. He had kind eyes, the patient slow voice of a grandfather. 

A schoolteacher. Here in, jail. 

"Yes sir." Erich scrubbed at his face with his hand. He remembered Herr Schiffer after a bit of trying, with less gray in his hair, guiding a hopping mess of children through the school hallways. 

"You'll be all right. It's not as if we were the enemy."

He didn't say _yes sir_ again. He didn't think he was capable of it.

"I'm sure there will be a judge, and this will all be cleared up. Maybe we'll pay a fine, or—"

Then there was a scream from very far down the corridor, beyond invisible doors. 

It climbed in frantic volume, fractured. Stopped. 

Now there was only a sound Erich thought was marching boots, until he realized it was his pulse beating in his eardrums. The scream started again, less structured, as though something essential had broken already. 

It went on for a very long time. 

It stopped a little while before the guards came to take him. 

Schiffer watched him with wet brown eyes, made a gesture with his hand, one fist tightening just a little. Maybe to wish him luck, maybe relief that it was Erich's turn to go and not his own. 

They ushered him in same direction as the screaming.

 

They brought him into a far less modern office this time. A heavy wooden desk with a policeman sitting behind it. A second guard stood behind him, just to his left, out of his sight. 

Erich sat where he was put, in a straight-backed wooden chair, hands cuffed in front of him through one of the arms. There was no typewriter here. The man in front of him read through a folder and made notes with a fountain pen on a thick pad of forms. Scratch-of-pen and two men and one boy breathing. Bootheels, passing outside. Silence.

The officer was a half-stone too thick in his stiff-pressed uniform, and he daubed at his mouth now and then, as if he wished for a drink or a cigarette. He never looked up, paging through documents with precise manicured fingers. His voice was heavy and nasal, very aristocratic to Erich's ears. 

"You've been reported as a homosexual. What we will do, here, today, is take down a record of your testimony before any decisions are made. Now.” He set down the papers with a tap and folded his hands on top of them. It was more like a closing than a beginning.

Erich could feel his eyes, but he didn't look above the height of the fountain pen. "I...didn't..."

A cough, or maybe a laugh. "Well, you must have done, else you wouldn't be here, mmm?" 

"But I didn't _do_ anything—"

The guard behind him wandered closer. 

The officer sighed and chose one particular piece of paper. "You've been seen in certain...establishments.”

Erich blinked, in disbelief, thinking somewhere, there are whole establishments? 

“Your guilt is not the question—you _are_ guilty, or you would be home in bed. The question is your willingness to reform, and your loyalty to the Fatherland."

He could hardly hear this man, now, after the very first sentence his heartbeat had become a parade of bootheels again. "I can't have been seen anywhere like that, I've never _been_ to anywhere, like, that."

"No?" A flick at the paper he was holding. "Certainly you must have been somewhere. We have very reliable reports. Are we to believe solid German citizens—" a rattle of paper at him—"or a homosexual? You're all notorious liars."

He felt terrifyingly close to tears, hot and sick. No one had ever called him a liar before. "There must be a mistake—"

Both policemen laughed at that immediately. 

Tears were collecting along his lower eyelids whether he wanted them there or not. 

“Oh, of course. Every man in Dachau is there by mistake, just ask him," said the man behind him. 

_Dachau._ That crow's call of a word made the tears overflow. 

The officer dropped his papers again. "You keep denying having been anywhere, but you don't deny that you are a homosexual?"

"I've never really _done_ anything—"

There must have been a signal, but Erich never saw it. 

The man behind him shoved his head down, and something heavy slammed into his back, unbelievably hard, emptying him of breath and thought. The pain seemed to come in a reversing wave, the blow pushing him forward and the spreading anguish pulling him back. He thought, _my back will be broken,_ and his lungs remembered how to expand and he drew in a great whooping breath. He was still mostly folded over. He didn't want to try to sit up, for fear of finding he couldn't move. 

"I didn't ask you what you've done. I asked you what you are."

He didn't realize he was supposed to answer. Another blow, straight across his kidneys, a third in exactly the same place. He screamed until his lungs were empty. When he caught his breath again he was sobbing. He moved to cover his face and his hands only dragged at the cuffs. It was worse than the beating. He was almost a grown man and these men could see him crying like a—

"Are you?"

"Yes!" he cried out at them, to make them stop, to keep them from hammering at him with that word again. To save himself any more of those terrible blows. 

The guard stepped in front of Erich to show him the rubber nightstick. A shiny black thing, an unspeakable thing. But he put it away at his belt, and gripped Erich by shoulder and hair and set him upright again. 

The officer was writing something with neat precise little motions. "There, see, if you'll be reasonable it won't be so hard."

"Yes sir," he said out of reflex, sounding like a child in his own ears. He sniffled, seized with the urge to plead with these men to uncuff his hands. He would have begged on his knees for a handkerchief if he'd thought either of them would give him one without hitting him again. It was all out of proportion, intolerable, unimaginable, that he couldn't just _wipe_ his damned eyes. He tried to turn his face into his shoulder, but he could only smudge at his cheek and his jaw. The attempt made a deep redviolet anguish bloom in his back, and he stopped trying. 

"Well. You understand that this is very serious. It may not seem so to..." a glance at one of his files—"a...boy your age, but the State is responsible for the State. A man's duty is to marry a German wife and have many German children. A man who is so disordered he won't do that is worse than useless to us—you're a drain on society, passing on nothing, and you're dangerous, because you can spread this disease to others."

Still this sense of falling, of dreaming. "I _know_ what you're supposed to do, I was _going_ to do all of that, I..." 

He trailed off, weeping, waiting for the blow. 

Was it true? Had he been going to marry and have children and work in an office and buy a house, all of that you were supposed to do?

The officer said "Yes!" and nodded as if this outburst had pleased him. "Now, that's the right kind of thinking. You see, you're not even really a young man, yet. If you say you haven't been involved in this, activity..."

"No, sir..." He hadn't, really, surely they didn't mean two kisses six years apart? 

"Well, maybe then there is something we can do, if you want to do the right thing, we can rehabilitate you. Sometimes arrangements can be made. You know you're lucky you were arrested so young. Boys with this disorder are generally hanged without much trouble over it."

It was delivered rather well, as if he were musing to himself. Erich was shocked into a stillness worse than the sobbing. He had never seen anyone hanged. He imagined the ground tilting dizzily under his feet, a crack as loud as the world breaking in half. 

The officer left him alone to imagine it for a while. "I think it's safe to say we can avoid that with further, documentation, of your sincerity."

"I don't..." He didn't have the energy for _understand._ It didn't matter. He was exhausted. The only wish he had left was that whatever it was they wanted, he could give them, quickly, and go back to his cell where Schiffer was

_(familiar)_

there to just, be there. He could lie on one of the benches and sleep and sleep. 

He knew that they were bargaining over his life. He didn't know what he might possibly have to bargain with. He'd been nodding for the past minute or three, or maybe since he'd been brought into this fear-drenched room. "Just, don't..."

"All right then, good. Now." He tapped the pen against his flawless teeth. "The, others, like yourself?"

A blank pause. "I don't know, any others..."

One slam of the side of his fist, not terribly hard, just a thud against the oak desktop. Frustration. As though Erich's deliberate thick-headedness was stalling his dinner break. "Come on, really, that's what this disease is, isn't it? That's the only symptom. Of course you know others."

"...no, I..."

"Don't you have men that you do these things with?"

They would make him confess it all, his pathetic little everything. "I've only ever been kissed. Twice."

The guard who had beaten him laughed, but he stopped when the officer didn't join him. 

"I suppose I shouldn't say it, but I actually believe you. You poor bastard." He did laugh, just a little. He still had the pen, ready.  
"Names?"

Stricken. Hands, the fingerprints blackened with printer's ink.

"They...were...I was, eight, the first one, I don't remember..."

A sharp look that he felt more than saw. "Not a first name, nothing?"

It was just, insanity, did it _matter_ to the police who he had kissed when he was _eight?_ "I really don't, sir, we were in the Jungenvolk—" He was thinking, furiously, ashamed of himself, every inch of him waiting to be pushed forward again. He would make up a name for this one, if they pushed him, but the problem, was, those hands, those fingerprints, that ink.

A disgusted sort of cough from the guard. 

The officer wrote down something. "The second?"

He waited for something to save him. There was a prickling like nausea under his tongue. "Don't, make..."

A frown, the pen hesitating, those eyes on him again. "The second name?"

Erich could not remember his face, only a voice, explaining how to center text with amusing arrogance, as if he were more than just an apprentice himself. The name that belonged to that voice would send that boy into the back of a car with his parents behind him, probably crying, into a room like this. 

"It was my fault, I gave him the wrong, impression..."

"If you're going to be the sort who would withhold information about criminal activities, there's nothing we can do for you."

_If I don't give them a name....._

A fake name? He fumbled through his thoughts for a story. He had no practice at lying. None at all. 

"You'll hang."

"Please—" No good. The crying was hitching through him again. The man took out the baton again, and he screamed even before he was struck. 

He lost count.

After a while, it stopped. 

The officer dropped something and said, "Take him outside—" and the man with the nightstick took hold of his arm and half-lifted him. Jingle of keys to uncuff him.

That was as brave as he could be, he found.

"Emil," he said. "Emil Muench."

There. No more soul, now he had nothing to bargain with. 

 

**Abstieg**

 

They brought him back to the cell. Only one man was still there, and he was sure it would not be Schiffer, but it was. He limped to the bench and sat down in a new stiff way, kidneys hot with a dull spreading pain that made him feel too heavy. The only thing that had saved him from serious harm during that last rapid handful of blows was that the guard was almost flailing, without serious accuracy. One shot had gotten him across an elbow, and bending that joint was almost impossible. The rest had thudded into his shoulderblades and back, leaving bruises he was sure would last for weeks.

Schiffer waited until the guard was gone and out of earshot, and came and sat beside him, fumbling at him trying to feel his head for, fever, as if he had no idea what other kind of gesture one might use on someone sick. "They beat you?"

He nodded, finding himself panting, as if he'd been running, and shaking in a new loose uncontrollable way. Aftermath. 

"What can you possibly have done?"

He didn't care anymore. "I kissed two boys."

There was a silence, in which the world failed to fall down. 

"They beat you like this for kissing two boys?" 

He nodded. Waited for the face he'd always imagined everyone making if they, knew. 

Silence, incredulous eyes blinking at him, and then the tobacco-rasp of a laugh. "Well, I'm glad you didn't kiss three boys."

 

He'd always known they'd find out eventually, no matter how perfect he was, no matter how careful he was to attract no attention. His only hope of keeping his perversion to himself had been that he never be examined closely, in any way. He'd dedicated his heart and soul to looking like that flawless quiet boy that never needed to be questioned.

And he'd failed.

Now there were four people who knew—two policemen, himself, and Schiffer. Probably more, tomorrow morning—secretaries and file clerks. 

He wondered if they would tell his parents. 

He tried to imagine what they would do, or think, and could not. 

Everyone would know, after a month or two of bridge games and whispers. 

He could see this fact, spreading from his one single _yes,_ in widening ripples. He tried to imagine everyone he knew, everyone he saw, knowing. He managed a sense of endless time battered with stares, of exhaustion and suffocation and claustrophobia.

There was nothing for it, now. 

He lay on the bench with his poor back against the cool of the wall and his head on his coat. 

Here was the reward he had promised himself, and all he could do was stare through the bars out into the corridor, hurting for all kinds of reasons, thinking, _jail,_ and thinking, _Emil._

Part of him had always wished they would find out, so he could stop the exhausting, debilitating struggle of being that imaginary, perfect boy. So he could stop manufacturing all this goodness to conceal his badness. So he could see what a dungeon might be like. So he would finally know and believe that such places were real. 

Now he knew more than he wanted to. 

And it was not yet even dawn.

He cried a little, with the collar of his coat folded over his face. If he didn't move, didn't change his breathing, he discovered he could do it soundlessly.

 

A different guard came and collected him, brought him to the same officer that had watched him beaten the night before. Erich sat in the same chair, already shaking. 

"Well, we've done what we can. You're to go to a labor camp." A glance at the files. "You've got several skills listed here, I'm sure something will be found. You'll be out in two years if you behave yourself."

 _Camp_ scared him quite a lot, and two years sounded endless when he tried to think of the entire span between Christmases, twice. 

Still, work didn't sound so very terrible. 

He could still sew anything put in front of him, and set type without errors as fast as 

_(Emil)_

anyone at the shop, really.

Emil had been the mistake. All he had to do was make sure he never made another. Maybe it would be all right. He would just do as he'd planned, as he'd always done. Be polite and obedient—and he wouldn't think about how long it was. He would think of it as a trade up from hanging. 

The guard uncuffed him. He signed things he wasn't invited to read. 

 

Six days later, the first guard came and took Erich from the cell. He was escorted to a vast rumbling graygreen hulk of a truck. The military bulk of it dried his tongue in his mouth. 

Nine other men he didn't know were already inside. The guard shoved him in, and the metal doors boomed closed behind him. Another jail, this one on wheels. He sat, wrapped small around himself. There were no windows.

All of them in the truck sat without speaking. One man was sobbing, cradling his left hand hidden under his coat. He got louder when the truck jolted over bad paving. All but two were a generic blur of working-class faces. 

These two, he thought, might be here for the reason he was here. They might have been brothers, but he doubted it. One was lean, with long brown hair and neat mustache. He made Erich think of an American cowboy. The other was thin and pale, unremarkable except for brilliant blue-green eyes. He was younger than the cowboy, by perhaps a decade. He looked, shell-shocked, the way Erich felt. 

The two men sat very close together, each with his arms wrapped tight around himself, hands tucked in, as if to keep himself from being tempted to touch the other. Sometimes their shoulders would press together. Erich was sure it was deliberate.

He tried to keep them from feeling his eyes.

A great soft veil of shock was wrapping him tight. On another level, underneath this numb surface, he was always thinking, staring at the floor of the truck, at the pairs of feet that shifted only rarely. Then was a swimming blur of fearful things, a hangman's noose, the medieval clang of the jail's door closing behind him. 

He studied his own hands, his fingers winding each other tight, the complexity of joints and nails and tendons. He listened to the crying man, and put his hands in his pockets. 

He was jealous of a shoulder to lean into.

 

**Ausgesucht**

 

“Out!”

He had dozed, being rattled and shaken, swaying in fear and exhaustion. He had dozed, and now he was being dragged out into a red sunset in a stumble of tired bodies. 

There were great milling, shrieking, arguing hordes of people. There was a smell hanging over everything, and he thought it must be a forest fire, but there was too much of meat and fat in the scent. That orange smell, and the orange sun. Every breath seemed weighted, greasy, just enough like ruined dinner to make him hungry. 

He'd heard the same horror-stories as everyone else, about the origin of this smell. He had watched the adults over his head proclaim it beyond belief, but none of them had ever tasted this air.

Erich had an impression of a long, long wall. He thought the camp must be inside this town. Later he would realize the camp was this town. 

He was struck now and then, adding new bruises to the set still livid from the Gestapo's beating, putting down fresh layers of darkening color. They were being herded. His eyes watered in pain and a strangely indignant, embarrassed sense of betrayal. He'd been perfectly obedient, and it hadn't mattered. They'd simply hit him anyway.

They were driven into a tiny sad row of ten. The officers had spread out to the left and right, flanking a long lean man whose back was turned. He was half a head taller than, everyone. He wrote something with no particular haste in a black leather notebook and turned, taking a cigarette from his lips. 

"All right then," he said. "I am Herr Doktor Obersturmführer Kaltherzig. I expect to be obeyed immediately. I do not repeat myself."

Kaltherzig took a lazy casual pace or two in either direction, studying each one of the prisoners in turn as if he had all the time in the world. He was half-a-head taller than the tallest of them. There was a lot of the bird in him—long, light bones, unspeakable quickness underneath the smallest of gestures. He had fast predator eyes the color of an American gun. His dark hair hung in a razorstraight line along one cheekbone, almost to his jaw. His face was composed of lines so very Imperial Roman the Race Office might've used him in a textbook.

Silence, from all of them, a quiet island in this deafening chaos. Erich could not breathe. He could not swallow. There was only his heartbeat, and this man. He was too hypnotized to realize he should look down. He caught a face full of Kaltherzig's complete attention. There was something like a smile or a threat and then the eyes left him like a knife reversing out of a wound. 

The doctor read names and block numbers that meant nothing to any of them. Two groups peeled off, each driven by an officer swinging a short baton. The two

_(others)_

men Erich had watched on the truck had been separated.

The narrow green-eyed man stared after the cowboy until the man behind him pushed him. He took one crooked step out of line, came to Kaltherzig, pleading in Swedish-colored German, caught at his sleeve, almost kneeling. Kaltherzig turned, one black eyebrow winging upward as though he were going to politely reply to a question. He drew his sidearm and shot the green-eyed man in the head. 

The crack drove an involuntary scream from Erich. 

There was a thick red spray, wet impacts on the ground. The man's hands came up one spasm, as though he might embrace the man who had shot him, or investigate the ruin that had replaced the back of his skull. His knees were already buckling.

Kaltherzig stepped away from these idiot hands, his lip peeling back in the sketch of a snarl. He holstered his gun, settled his long black coat. 

The man fell. He landed on one side. Nothing about him moved again except the crimson triangle, spreading.

The cowboy made an unspeakable noise. He turned after much too long, staring, struggling against the flow of people. The man behind the cowboy tried to push him, hissed something, and then darted around him, wanting none of this. The guard shouted at him. He didn't move. He could only stare at what was left of the green-eyed man, making a silent face that was scream after scream.

Erich saw the gun come up and covered his ears, closed his eyes. The gunshot never came. The cowboy must've started walking again.

Kaltherzig and Erich were alone with the great spreading pandemonium of Selektion getting louder around them. 

"Name." 

It sounded, too far away. He almost had to lip-read to understand the order.

"Erich Kass, Herr Obersturmführer, sir." 

His voice shook on the sir. He stared and stared at the muddy ground and could feel his eyes straining to flick back to the gun. His ears and all his teeth rang with the echo and the meaning of that noise cracking the world. His eyes got away from him, and he had to look. 

The gun was holstered. This officer in front of him was unmoved. Kaltherzig did something like a smirk, but his eyes didn't change at all. His hands were calm and steady and sure. He wore a single ring, where a man would wear a wedding band, the grinning death's head surrounded by runes. It seemed all tangled with the gun, the same black magic, the same hieroglyph. 

Kaltherzig wrote something short and sharp, closed the notebook hard so the leather snapped. "You're with me." 

 

Auschwitz swarmed in around them. There was a clean, clear place if he stayed at Kaltherzig's elbow, and he thought of a shark parting a school of fish and hurried and shook and it could not possibly be real. There was too much of it. He realized they were walking towards the smokestacks. His knees did something and he staggered until Kaltherzig caught the back of his arm, drawing him upright and hauling him along faster. 

"The ovens...please..."

"We're not going to the ovens, you idiot. Now move."

He walked. Sniffled. Swiped at his face with his sleeve, grateful to be able to do that much, at least.

A building labeled DESINFEKTION. They walked into a lobby with yards of numbered hooks. Kaltherzig granted him no time at all to examine any of this, moving so quickly in those long implacable strides that Erich nearly had to run to keep up with him. Beyond the hooks he was bundled through a set of doors into a wide expanse of white tile and wet and women, all of them naked. Some of them stared at him, though there were male and female SS herding them, shouting, hitting them to hurry them. 

"It's all right, ladies, this is a pink one. Not interested," Kaltherzig said. Only guards laughed. If not for the grip on his arm Erich would have slipped and fallen. He flushed, miserable, hating Kaltherzig, hating all these women. 

There were more doors beyond the long shower room, flanked by guards. Kaltherzig dragged him through them. There were more of the women here, lined up at a long bank of tables. There was a cluster of people at the opposite end of the room, with something being done in the invisible middle that was making a young woman scream. Most people were ignoring this. 

"Move back," Kaltherzig said. He did not raise his voice. A few moved. Some didn't move quickly enough, and these he shoved, sometimes hard enough to qualify as a throw. He presented Erich to the end of this table. "Next," he told the guard sitting there. She took the notebook Kaltherzig offered and wrote things down and typed something. Kaltherzig took Erich's left arm and shoved up his sleeve. 

The needle hurt, buzzing like something you might hear in a barber shop, and it felt like being scratched by a house cat. It was infuriating for being done over and over. Erich gritted his teeth and tried not to move. More maddening drags that spelled lines of light behind his eyelids. Kaltherzig kept his hand just above Erich's elbow. He turned from watching the blue numbers inked in, and gave Erich one luminous look without speaking. 

Erich thought he should memorize it, having heard guards shouting at people by number. An E. An H. Then a blur, that blinking did not clear. 

When it was done Kaltherzig led him farther on. He gave a new guard his clipboard, and said "Absolutely not!" when she turned to the striped heap of uniforms behind her. She sent a prisoner beside her out of the room. Kaltherzig waited. Erich stole a look at his tattoo. He was bleeding, just enough to smear.

The prisoner came back with a striped uniform, folded, and a handful of gray and pink scraps. Kaltherzig pulled Erich out of the flow of traffic and presented him with this armload of black and almost-white. "Hurry up." 

He started to say, _here?_ Then he remembered _I do not repeat myself,_ and took off his coat. Kaltherzig took it from him. He slid off his shoes, fingers fumbling, and was down to his underwear when Kaltherzig said, "That's enough," and he put on these strange coarse things. 

They were new, though carelessly made, and almost fit him. He turned up the trouser-legs. Kaltherzig said, "Put your shoes back on." He threw Erich's coat back to him, but the crisp white shirt and the gray trousers that went with his best suit were thrown to a prisoner. 

Erich discovered he was holding two pink fabric triangles and two strips of white cloth with his number inked on them. There was a needle threaded through the scraps, holding them together. He stared at them until Kaltherzig shoved his hand towards his pocket, and he put them away. 

He stood dressed, feeling, undressed, thinking, no more soul. 

He might as well be naked. 

Everyone, everyone would know. With a single look. 

 

There was a car idling in the street, with a lieutenant at the wheel. Kaltherzig pushed him into the back seat and got in beside him. He sat suddenly cushioned in leather.

There were more gunshots. It took very few of them before Erich stopped cringing, almost stopped noticing. The intermittent explosions and the sub-threshold noise of distant crying and shouting all began to seem part of the environment, like the weather or that frying-meat smell. 

He thought of stained glass windows. One slice of story. It was like that, now. An ugly woman with a blue-black scarf over her head, clinging to two children. His first glimpse of Mengele, though he did not know who he was. A group of three men, an older one and two grown sons, maybe, huddled together waiting their turn with the man in the white gloves, their turn with the pointing cane. 

And then the car was pulling away from all this, the wide gate the truck had come in growing smaller and smaller. Another gate, this one in a wire fence. More guards. The car smelled of new and leather and Kaltherzig and cigarette smoke. 

He sat, still out of phase. He had straightened his shirt and his coat and the new striped cap. He could feel Kaltherzig looking at him. 

The hands came at him so quickly he almost screamed. Kaltherzig cupped Erich's face with his fingertips, like a cage. The gloves were soft as skin. He turned Erich's head left and right, tilted his chin up. Erich closed his eyes, heart triphammering, and Kaltherzig allowed this, pushing his thumb on the point of Erich's chin until he understood and opened his mouth, touching even the arches of his teeth, closing once around Erich's tongue and almost tugging. He made some small sound at this, a flinch, and the fingers were snatched out of his mouth and Kaltherzig punched him in the left cheekbone, hard enough to send him over on his side across the seat. 

_He's so fast._

Erich lay shaking, dabbed at his cheek with one hand. No blood, but a deep pulsing hurt. Kaltherzig took hold of Erich's coat and pulled him upright again. He held the boy's eyelids open with his thumbs, tilting him to look into the pale sunlight until tears streamed down his face. Kaltherzig was expressionless. He might have been examining him for, damage. He let Erich go, reached inside his coat, took out a cigarette and lit it.

"Your hair is much too dark. So is mine. " Kaltherzig shrugged. "The eyes are incredible, though. Such a tropical blue. How old did you say you were?"

“Sixteen this March, Herr Doktor Obersturmführer, sir."

"Sir will do. That mouthful is for the idiots at the hospital." He turned down his window and flicked ashes out into the street. 

They passed yet another gate, and now they were driving through a wide almost-garden, neatly laid saplings and carefully kept grass, artistic sweeping flowerbeds that were still gleaming with the last of the late bloomers. The woods were a green darkness an acre or so distant. _It's beautiful,_ Erich thought, and that wasn't right at all, with the smokestacks behind them.

There were striped slaves, here and there, working in this garden. 

"Can you type?"

"Yes sir." 

He cut that, mouthful, at the very last second. 

"And spell?"

"Yes sir."

"All of that, quickly?"

He _yes-sirred_ again. If only this man would let him work. He had done almost perfectly all through school and in all his days in the print shop, never a complaint, praise from every teacher in every subject. He would be so perfect, if only Kaltherzig would let him.

A noncommittal sort of noise. "And you can sew, I presume, from your, father, was it? Well enough to mend things, or well enough to make things?"

"Both...my father made uniforms in Berlin, I can make one from material in two days, sir." Was he allowed to volunteer information? 

Kaltherzig smiled. "You'll do all of that, and whatever else I tell you, my boy."

 

**Desinfektionsraum**

 

They pulled into the long paved driveway of a neat sprawl of a house. The sun had set, and the shadows were long. There was already a blaze of searchlights in the distance, white wedges cutting into the darkening sky. Kaltherzig pushed Erich up the walk, unlocked the door and pushed him inside. A foyer with a marble floor, everything trimmed in dark wood polished to gleam like glass. The lush sort of quiet that you only found in the most expensive houses. 

"Don't touch anything." 

Kaltherzig steered him by his shoulder through a beautiful living room. Erich only saw pieces, bookshelves, a fireplace, and got the sense of a space that was both Norse and Roman. He was herded down a hallway into the bedroom, past the massive loom of a four-poster bed, and then the bathroom, a gleaming white box of new tile and chrome.

"Strip. Put everything here.” Kaltherzig kicked an empty wicker basket on the floor. He left, the door hanging open. 

Hot miserable swoosh from his neck to his face. He took off his coat and put it in the basket. Unbuttoned this slave shirt and put it in after. It seemed to be harder to move his hands with each layer of clothing. He gritted his teeth and thought of their gruff but harmless doctor at home. 

Once he was naked there was that same old odd hospital sense of being cold and bare that never seemed to be there when you undressed to bathe. He wanted to cover himself, and didn't. He waited. He wrapped his arms around himself. Soon there would be the weight of those eyes. Surely it wouldn't feel as dangerous as he feared. He told himself, he's a doctor. Waited.

Kaltherzig came back in black rubber gloves with a blank metal can. He pushed Erich so that it was step into the tub or fall into it, poured most of the can over Erich's head. Soap, from the smell, something blue and stinging and chemical. Erich choked and spluttered, eyes burning. 

Kaltherzig plugged the tub and turned on both tabs, pushed him down, picked up a brush. He started on Erich's chest, scrubbing without mercy, as the water got deeper and hotter around him. Erich squirmed as little as possible, blinking and gasping and trying so hard to be, still, telling himself _but he's a doctor._

He was helplessly reminded of what a bath must be like for a dog. He wasn't expected to assist or even understand directions; Kaltherzig pulled him or shoved him or rearranged him as he saw fit. He poured more of this awful stuff into Erich's hair and scrubbed this with his fingers, and this part might've felt almost good, if not for the acidblaze in his eyes. 

The brush again, on his stomach, across his chest, gouging at his nipples. Kaltherzig scrubbed him down to his toes, back up to the hinge of his thighs, dragged him up onto his hands and knees. Long swipes of the bristles up and down his back, excruciatingly pleasant at first, that melting kind of satisfying of having all those unreachable itches scratched at once, but the bristles were digging hard enough to sting after a second or two. Kaltherzig held him by the back of his neck, by his hair, scrubbing hard in merciless circles and lines. 

The soap burned him like alcohol in the scratches Kaltherzig was leaving. He couldn't keep quiet. He muffled his face in the crook of his elbow, his hands clinging to his own shoulders, trying to endure this. And then Kaltherzig spread the cheeks of his buttocks open with one hand and scrubbed between them. 

He screamed. He'd had no idea he could make such a noise. It began almost indignantly, and changed with distressing speed into something desperate and terrified.

Kaltherzig laughed, lingering over the ring of muscle, pushing there with the point of the brush. "What's the matter? Am I hurting you?"

He didn't know if he was supposed to say _yes sir._ He was sobbing. There was nothing in the world but the bright hot shock of it and the shame of it. The sound of the can again, and the thunk splash of the brush hitting the water. 

Kaltherzig let him go, spread him wider. "Get your knees apart." 

Fingers _pushed_ at him. He had time to think that it felt like two and drew in one anguished breath before they shoved inside him, greased with disinfectant. Kaltherzig dragged them in and out in the same scrubbing motions, laughing at the particularly tortured noises, sometimes repeating a gesture to wring out a longer scream. He pushed those two fingers in up to his palm, until Erich begged him to stop, choking out _sir_ after _sir._

Nothing bought him the slightest pity. There was the distressing sense that it was all, business, that he was property to be maintained. The fingers twisted inside him and he buried his wet face in his wet arms and made long ugly cries at the spreading sting in all the tiny secret torn places. The fingers slid out, so fast it left him with an aching urge to, gag, or cough, and he stumbled over a breath and realized this hysterical echo was himself. 

Kaltherzig picked up the brush again and drew up his balls in one hand and scrubbed, ignoring the agonized howling. He kept on long after Erich had given up on screaming, drew his penis back between his legs and scoured it off too, tugged back the foreskin and scrubbed at the underside and the head until Erich collapsed on his stomach, feet kicking a little, legs still spread. 

Kaltherzig threw down the brush. 

Erich lay in water almost hot enough to scald him, just on his hands and knees far enough to keep from drowning, crying listlessly.

A beat, and the soft impact of armloads of clothing landing on top of him. 

"Wash all that. Clean all this before you come out. And wash yourself with something so that you smell human."

He turned his head, water lapping at his cheek, clothes spreading in a shipwrecked tangle around him. He said to Kaltherzig's back, "...what, should I put on...sir..."

"Nothing." And the door closed between them.

 

Erich lay crying, hands cradled between his legs.

Was that rape? Did that count, or did it have to, be...did you call it that at all, when it was a boy, doing it to a boy?

_He's a doctor._

The soap inside him would not let him be still for long. He groped his way to the toilet and cried a little longer sitting there until the worst of it seemed to be out of him. _Alcohol,_ he thought. It smelled of hospital.

_He's a doctor. It was to prevent the spread of disease._

At least he'd given him that terrible bath in private.

_But he was laughing while he did it, he, was..._

He scrubbed out all the clothes, washed himself with a bar of soap as soft as cream. It smelled of Kaltherzig, and stung in the places where the brush had marked him like sunburn.

That burning pain inside him doubled him over with cramps, drove him back to the toilet twice, sobbing between gritted teeth. He turned on the taps, knelt in the tub and washed himself there as best he could. Anything to stop that blazing need to push, squirm, scream. 

It was softer than he expected. Inside. He could still feel Kaltherzig's fingers, as if they were still there. He washed his hands with the soap again and shuddered. 

Was Kaltherzig _allowed_ to do this to him? Was it, legal? He dried himself and the floor and the edge of the tub, hung up the stopper and the brush, wrung out his wet uniform and spread it over the side of the tub to dry.

_Why can I still feel him doing, that?_

He had watched the doctor shoot a man for asking a question. Whatever this was it wasn't as bad as being shot. Kaltherzig hadn't taken any pains to hide the 

_(murder)_

execution. And there had been at least a dozen more. If that was permitted, this was probably laughable. This had been rather gentle as far as rape could go, he imagined. Some of the women had been made to strip naked on the ramp, in front of God and everybody. He thought of the woman screaming at the other end of the shower, of a very blond man laughing at her and doing something that he leaned into with his shoulder.

He looked at himself in the mirror. He was painted with long throbbing swatches of pink, everywhere he was scrubbed and scalded. There were dozens of raised lines where the bristles had marked him, red enough to be real scratches in the morning, scrawled over the deep redblack bruises.

He washed the gloves and hung up the towel and stood with nothing left do but leave. 

He opened the door and stepped naked out into the bedroom. 

 

**Gehirnwäsche**

 

He was cold, with his bare skin and damp hair. 

Kaltherzig was sitting on the bed barefoot in crisp new white shirt and black pants.

_(as if I were, contaminated)_

Another cigarette was clamped in those perfect teeth. He was pulling on a set of gloves, shorter than the black ones dripping dry in the bathroom. They were white, wrist-long. They snapped like dangerous. 

He thought, _he'll hurt me again._ There was a dull dread, and again that swooping awareness of his nakedness. He was so very tired. He looked at Kaltherzig too long and those eyes came up and struck him again. Took him. He felt his feet move as if he were dreaming, and he took one step forward. Kaltherzig patted the bed beside him

_(he might do that for a dog)_

and opened something he was holding and slicked the same two fingers of his right hand. Erich climbed up beside him, waited to be steered. He was handed a pillow, which he stared at, and Kaltherzig sighed and put it down and pushed him down on his face over it so that it raised his hips. 

He was crying again, couldn't help it, had he known how much child he still had left inside him? Could this doctor do this to him, in this house that looked just like anyone's house? Could this happen to him in a normal bed that someone slept in every single night?

The gun was still on Kaltherzig's belt, draped over a lush heavy chair. 

Erich wrapped his arms around his head and tried to stop the idiot crying. It wouldn't help. He'd learned that already.

"Does it hurt you?" Calm, almost as if Kaltherzig sympathized. The textbook doctor voice. At least he didn't sound inclined to laugh, now. More sounds of the jar he was holding. 

"Yes sir." 

He just wanted it to be over. He would do what he was told for whatever was left and afterward, sleep. That same reward that had gotten him through the very first piece of this. Sooner or later the pain would end and he would sleep and it would all stop for a while. 

“Are you bleeding?”

"No sir." He burrowed his face into the bedspread, to keep his eyes from overflowing, and wound two handfuls of the blanket and tried to breathe, breathe, breathe.

That same noncommittal noise. Fingers, nudging his legs apart, spreading the cheeks of his buttocks and pressing at that aching ring of muscle, again, and he made one pitiful noise and stopped himself, ashamed. 

He expected that terrible, shoving, slide, but this was not exactly that; a slow petting stroke, smoothing a generous layer of something cool on him, and inside him in gradually deeper presses. The gentle, circles to rub the ointment in left him quiet and dissociated. He felt tended, helpless, and he allowed his legs to be spread farther apart and when both fingers pushed inside him again he arched his back and tried to breathe, deeper. 

"That's much better." 

He closed his eyes tighter, that same endorphin, whatever-it-was, that always happened whenever anyone, praised him, that starving, feeling. He didn't know what he was doing better. He tried not to move. 

"Push towards me."

He tried to lean with his back and his hips. He got an approving murmur and that lovely pressing circle harder, slower. "Do you like that?"

He pushed towards Kaltherzig again, chewing his lip.

Kaltherzig held him down with his other hand and pinched, one finger inside him and his thumb outside, nails digging into the ring of his anus, a sudden startling edge under the smooth glide of rubber.  
"What was the first thing I ever said to you?"

He was caught, in mid-cry, and he almost felt his brain do a kind of seizure like a butterfly in a jar, trying to remember. "...that you don't, repeat yourself...I'm sorry..."

"That's very pretty, but once you're _sorry_ —" a much, harder, pinch, and more pull that made him scream, one throat-scraping undignified squawk. "—you've already done something wrong. And you still haven't answered me."

"Yes! Yes, I liked it." Was that true? He was hard, increasingly so. It must be true. There was one more pull, and a twist with those nails that went on until he realized what he'd forgotten. “Sir! Sir...” 

Kaltherzig slid his fingers inside again immediately.

Erich thought, I'll be quiet, and couldn't. That first push was such a loud, texture, that it drowned out everything. He had to make noise or something inside him might break. He clung to the bedspread and shook and ground his teeth. Kaltherzig did it again, that gentle rolling push, just _there._ That same blur of stunned and stricken, a pang with every single slide, so hard and unstoppable and _sexual_ that he couldn't breathe past it. He had never imagined such a feeling existed. None of his forgotten dreams or fumbling in the dark had brought him any warning of it. 

A laugh. That familiar lingering in places that made him frantic. Deliberate little gestures, a mean aching interlude of having the fingers drawn out, teasing outside in pointless little strokes, and then all the way and right, _there._ A circle that he felt in his teeth and that fluttering push again fastfastfast and he was making a sound like an engine, and his knees and his shoulders and his spine pushed him closer to Kaltherzig's hand. 

"It's your prostate. That idiot Mengele insists to me that there's no such organ." A laugh, and out again. Erich made a noise that embarrassed him, pushed towards Kaltherzig's hand and stopped himself. Kaltherzig patted him and pushed in again with three fingers, easing off when Erich wailed, and pushing in again with that same, inexorable patience. That merciless flutter. 

Now there was pain with that deep, distressing pleasure, and he leaned away from it instinctively. Kaltherzig leaned over him, moving with serpentine speed, that flawless statue's face so close to his he was afraid to blink for fear of brushing him with his eyelashes. "You're resisting it."

"I can't help it, I'll, scream..."

A shrug. “So? Scream.” That nothing look that wasn't quite a smile. Those fingers curled inside him, pulled him like a hook somewhere that made his back come up. 

"You don't know what that is?" 

A thump, inside him, in that immovable place. "Your tailbone." Another, lift, too slow to hurt him, and the delirium of _he's pushing my spine from the inside,_ and a moan he forgot to muffle. 

A twist that almost hurt, and a shift. "I can feel your pulse, here.....as fast as if you'd been running....." Pressure in a soft place that made Erich feel his own heartbeat. A laugh, and a thudding series of pushes that rocked him on his hands and knees like a shove. He was making the same sound every time he managed to draw a breath, face pushed into the bed as hard as he could to drown out this rising and falling wail.

"Now."

He didn't understand what Kaltherzig wanted him to do, but it had something to do with whatever was at the end of this, climbing. 

"No? I've never had one come, being examined like this. I wonder if it's even possible."

Erich still had no idea what he was talking about. He wouldn't have been able to oblige if he had. The hurt was too much. His stomach ached. After much too long Kaltherzig did something like a snarl of frustration and the fingers were almost, snatched, out of him, making him draw up his shaking knees. 

Quiet, for so long that Erich turned his head to look over his shoulder, blinking through his hair. 

Blur of Kaltherzig with his hand between his own legs. 

He was unbuttoning his pants. 

Erich turned his face back to the mattress and wrapped his arms around his head. 

Kaltherzig grasped his hips and spread him open with his thumbs. There was one warning nudge of his penis before he pushed inside, a merciless shove with all his weight behind it. 

Erich drew in his breath in anticipation of rending pain, but there was only a deafening sense of being so very full. There was friction was so deep it set his teeth on edge, and then the first threat of a monstrous pleasure. He clung, shaken, stricken, mouth muffled open against the bedspread. 

Kaltherzig made some sound behind him, spread him wider, thumbs pressing bruise-hard with that awful squeak of rubber. He was pushing inside deeper still, and there was the first real pain, strange and stomachache deep, that brought a wavering cry to his throat. 

Kaltherzig stopped, held himself here. "Put your knees under you, straighten your back." 

He did this, sobbing again because it moved the penis inside him.  
Could he do this in a, house...where people, lived...

Deeper, and that stretching hurt was, gone, and there was that excruciating, slide, and he moaned because he couldn't help it, and the push of the buttons of Kaltherzig's pants against his thigh. He leaned forward, hands coming down to the bed on either side of Erich's shoulders, and there was a withdrawal that hurt, and the push inside again and he was pushing, right, there, harder and faster and faster.

He reached under Erich, wrapped one gloved slippery hand around his cock. 

Almost a scream of dismay, and a thrashing try at squirming that he stopped because of the cock inside him still pinning him down. Long, oiled pulls. Kaltherzig's hand tight around him. Slower, meaner slams inside him. A seizure started in all his muscles. He was afraid he would, fall, and the climbing was more like a hook pulling him faster and faster. “No...”

Kaltherzig let him go and slapped the right cheek of his buttocks so hard it stunned him. Erich collapsed, the cock sliding out. He was drawn back, impaled again before he could even draw a breath to cry out. 

"Don't you ever tell me _no_ again."

Erich looked over his shoulder at Kaltherzig. Those winter eyes were half-closed, mouth slack. That not-quite smile returned. He leaned closer, tilted his ear towards Erich's mouth to collect his noises, rolled his hips in slow irresistible pushes. He pushed Erich down flat and went faster still, drove in with that terrible wrong-angle hurt again, and when he screamed long and loud in shock Kaltherzig moaned and went harder. 

He hid his face, sobbed, chewed his arm to keep from screaming. That pleasure had gone with the first bolt of that pain. Now there was more misery than delight. He was crying without restraint. A devastating set of thrusts so hard he was paralyzed, much too deep. He couldn't breathe. Kaltherzig was shaking on top of him. 

He took one long breath, and gripped Erich hard enough to hurt and pulled out of him. Erich didn't move. He hadn't been told he could. 

"Go and clean yourself up," Kaltherzig said. 

 

He expected blood, and found none, only slippery colorless stuff that smelled of ocean. He did what Kaltherzig had told him to do, feeling very sleepy. The panic had almost gone. The worst of things had happened, would happen again, and this beautiful creature would probably shoot him at the end of these days. 

 

When he stepped back into the bedroom Kaltherzig was naked from the waist down, shirt on but unbuttoned, tie missing. He had his hand between his legs. Erich was afraid to look here, for fear of seeing blood or shit. Kaltherzig cupped his head again and pulled his face down. "You know how."

He had no idea how.

He wanted to struggle or protest, scream in outrage. He still couldn't look. He opened his mouth because he had to, the fear of the gun beating in his head like a furious bird. He thought, _if I'm sick he'll shoot me._ Kaltherzig thumped the top of his head. "Clean," he whispered, and Erich understood.

He wasn't sick. He tasted nothing but that strange ocean smell in his nostrils. 

Kaltherzig's hand thudded him again. "You can do better than that." 

He wrapped one hand around this mysterious cock, drew back this luxurious skin, thinking of expensive cloth in his father's storeroom. He tried to imitate the tiny list of things that he found pleasurable during his few brief and unsuccessful attempts at masturbation. 

Kaltherzig seemed to unwind. His hand came down to the top of Erich's head again, resting there. After a long time, he pulled Erich away. "Every time, after." 

Every time. 

He thought of the women, screaming, and the shaven stick-men carrying luggage and bodies through the pandemonium of unloading. 

Was he grateful? 

There were pages in his brain like a book, turning too fast to see, listing all the ways it might be worse, pointing out that at least there was only this one. There was still that sense of deafness, as though the gunshots had broken part of his hearing and part of his mind along with it. None of it seemed quite real, and yet nothing that had ever come before seemed as real as this. Something inside him was crying out—more frantic question than fact—that if he were perfect, he might yet avoid that crimson triangle, that fall. 

 

"Are you bleeding?"

That solicitous question, again, and that mishmash of images that meant _doctor._ Hadn't there always been something of this cruelty in everything medicinal? Flicker of having his tonsils out, crying and crying, and being plied with puddings and yogurts and shaved ice he didn't want. 

"No sir." He was pushed onto his face again anyway, spread and dabbed at. He told himself it was ungrateful to still, be, crying. It seemed better if he was quiet. There was less of him when he was quiet. 

"No, not yet." 

The jar, again, the fingers inside him slippery with cream. It was over quickly this time. Kaltherzig slapped his thigh, shoved him in the direction of the door. 

He climbed down, unsteadily, watched Kaltherzig drag and push the covers back and slide under. He didn't understand. He had his hand on the doorknob when Kaltherzig came at him, snarling. 

"Where do you think you're going?" He gave Erich a shove that thudded his forehead and shoulder into the wall, hard enough to bring him to his knees. 

"You said, to..."

"I said no such thing; I put you, here." A shove with his foot, thudding Erich over onto his back. "Do what I tell you, stay where I put you."

Silence. 

He waited until Erich started for _yes sir_ and did that whipcrack voice again. "If you cannot remember that you won't last a week. And you would be _amazed_ how many boys can't follow simple directions." 

Erich didn't move, didn't dare a _yes sir._

 _The gun,_ he thought, if that one single hieroglyph, blue-black and unconquerable could be called a thought.

Footsteps, and the soft impact of a blanket thrown at him. 

The fire crackling, dying. When he could move again he wound himself small under the blanket, covered head and all, and waited for the sleep he'd promised himself, trying and failing to think of nothing, nothing, nothing. 

He could hear Kaltherzig breathing above him. He could feel the gun, and then he would feel, again, some piece of tonight, a rolling echo of that first pleasure. And then he would feel the gun again, as though he were being driven in circles. 

There was a grandfather clock somewhere in the house. It chimed the hour with an elegant low tone. Erich heard twelve and one before there was the longed-for patch of oblivion.


	2. Part Two of Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day One in Auschwitz.

**Missbrauch**

 

The distant cry of a siren woke Erich when it was still dark. There was a stupid set of minutes when he had no idea where he was. He only knew this noise that meant he might be late for something. 

He lay dazed, the blanket trapping his limbs, feeling a thousand tiny aches from sleeping on the floor. Memory came back in one crashing piece, and his throat caught and his eyes filled with tears, and he swallowed and sat up, saw that Kaltherzig was a white sleeping shape in a bed wide enough for a king.

He had dared to slide to the very foot of the bed where a thick narrow rug covered the hardwood floor, and from there he supposed he must have slept. A confusion of dreams, people with scalpels chasing him into trucks labeled DUSCHEN. 

He was afraid to stand up. He folded the blanket in a crouch, and crawled into the bathroom, standing after he'd pushed the door closed behind him. His uniform was dry, and he touched it, trying to believe in it. It was stiff and strange. He took his patches from the coat pocket, stared at them. 

He knew where they went. He'd seen them on the others, hadn't he, red triangles, yellow ones, a rainbow code of crimes made visible.

To everyone.

His hands remembered how to sew as well as they ever had, but it felt like they belonged to someone else, and he watched himself stitch the pink triangle and his number on the shirt and the trouser leg. 

It felt, different, now, when he put it on, and he couldn’t not see this gleam of pink just in his peripheral vision. There was that weight of being revealed, the hot shame of it. He imagined that was the point of it, a little punishment that never ended and required no effort on the part of the SS. 

_I didn't ask you what you've done, I asked you what you are. ___

__He crawled back and sat at the foot of the bed where Kaltherzig had put him._ _

__When the clock chimed eight Kaltherzig stretched and sat up, smoothed back that fall of hair, predator eyes still sleepy. He looked down at Erich with no particular surprise or interest. "Can you cook?"_ _

__"A...little, sir." Somewhat true, though his mother had never been satisfied with his efforts. He'd been tempted to creep to the kitchen while Kaltherzig slept, but the bruise on his forehead kept him too afraid of the doorknob._ _

__"Good, go." He was dragging through a wardrobe when Erich crept out._ _

__The idea of quiet had gotten its hooks in him. The less he spoke, the softer he was when he had to speak, the less noise of opening and closing and footsteps and misery and breathing he made, the less notice he would attract. The less catastrophe he would invite._ _

__He found a luxuriously appointed kitchen. The first door he tried led into a dark and utterly empty closet. Then he saw the ring set in the floor, and understood it was the cellar. The second door turned out to be the pantry. After much frantic searching he made coffee and warmed bread and cut the green tops off strawberries._ _

__Kaltherzig came downstairs, sharp as a razor from hat to gleaming boots. He took coffee and bread and lit a cigarette, settled in his armchair, gestured at the phonograph till Erich understood what he wanted and started it for him._ _

__"Eat. Everything you touch you put back as you found it.”_ _

__That seemed like, enough of a dismissal, so Erich retreated to the kitchen and obsessed over the miniscule mess he'd made. He ate while he washed everything and moved dishes in the cabinets tiny increments of an inch and squinted at the floor to see if he'd missed any crumbs._ _

__He was...not quite, hurt, inside. But there was a sense of having been changed, and twinges that were almost pleasure. He thought of the skeleton-men with the luggage, and told himself over and over that he was lucky, that he would be perfect, that it would be all right._ _

__

__A different Untersturmführer came in the same car. Erich put on his coat and got in as Kaltherzig gestured._ _

__No trains now, only the great gate and the tracks vanishing on the horizon line. One of the smokestacks was already puffing bluegray into the air. Guards leaned in black silhouette in the gun towers, smoking or with coffee steaming in one gloved hand. Everything was motionless, as if everyone were always waiting for something._ _

__They drove to one of the many identical buildings, this one very close to the ovens. A little sign read merely _Block 10._ A double line of those skeleton men was marching across the street with eerie fake cheer, an SS man with a whip behind them. One long stream of numbers and patches rainbowed by him; the yellow star, most often, but triangles too, in red, green, brown, purple. No pink ones. He dreaded taking his coat off._ _

__He knew what Block 10 was the moment they stepped through the door. Only a hospital had that bright cold smell. Kaltherzig steered him through a sort of doctor's office, with SS in uniforms and lab coats and various combinations of the two, prisoners, prisoner doctors, patients being led wailing or stricken silent. It was crowded chaos, and it made him think longingly of the cool quiet in Kaltherzig's house._ _

__Erich was pushed into an examining room with _Ahren Kaltherzig, Lagerarzt_ painted on the fogged glass. The doctor closed and locked the door behind them, closed the blinds, opened his briefcase on his desk. The noise was shut out, rendered distant and unimportant. They were alone again. _Ahren,_ he thought. It might have been better not to know that, though he could not have said why._ _

__There was so much metal in here. So many cabinets. So many drawers._ _

__Out came the notebook._ _

__"Take all of that off."_ _

__Speed was becoming automatic. That separation was setting in as a reflex, how useful, how clever of his mind to take care of him like that._ _

__Kaltherzig took his clothes from him, set them unreachably aside, patted the table. This, too, was metal, and cold enough to make him want to flinch away from it. He had to use the little foot-ledge to climb up. When he slid back his feet dangled. Kaltherzig wrote something down, said without looking, "I'm going to measure you and photograph you. Nothing so terrible yet."_ _

__That doctor-vibration again, the closest to friendly he had yet seen Kaltherzig. That smile that showed none of his teeth—he had learned the other kind was a sign of danger._ _

__"I'll let you know when to panic."_ _

__He said, "Yes sir," because some kind of response seemed required._ _

__"You're too small for your age."_ _

__"Yes sir.” He was blushing, as though it were his own fault. He had always been small, had been so little at birth they'd told his mother to plan his funeral. He thought of telling Kaltherzig this, but he didn't._ _

__He suffered the usual routine doctor-type things, tongue depressor, stethoscope and a light in his eyes and ears. Kaltherzig had to lean near him, smelling of sandalwood soap and aftershave, German tobacco, Turkish coffee. It made him think of the couch in his father's den, soft but too scratchy to sleep on._ _

__The doctor nudged at the worst of the bruises, noted something in his file. Erich flushed again at this— _he'll think I was bad, he'll ask me what I did to deserve them—_ but he said nothing about this stigmata of disobedience._ _

__Kaltherzig pushed Erich onto his back, hinged strange crooked things out from under the table. He pulled up Erich's knees, hooked them over deep metal saddles, spread wide and strapped on bruise-tight. "Panic all you like, but keep still."_ _

__His arms were strapped straight out at his sides, along little tables that looked modified for this use, from some other more innocuous purpose. Trays, maybe, for instruments. There were plenty of those on carts, spread on white cloth in sharp silver rows._ _

__His feet were put in stirrups, strapped, pushed up til he could see the ceiling through them. Kaltherzig pulled his hips forward til he felt the edge of the table below the small of his back. Already this position hurt his shoulders, his lower back. Straps around his chest, his waist. If he raised his head could see a very finite square of white wall and Kaltherzig at the foot of the table. He could not even watch what was being done to him._ _

__"You're to stay quiet. Don't distract me."_ _

__He _yes-sirred._ Swallowed over and over. Blinked very fast. Almost panted in dread. He watched Kaltherzig shake a wide thermometer, swirl it in a jar. He stumbled into those eyes again, blushed bright. He stared up at the ceiling, and it took almost a minute before he realized there were fine splatters of blood on the tiles. He blinked, and they remained. It dried his tongue in his mouth. Blood, faint and unmistakable arcs of it—how had it gotten on the ceiling? Then the thermometer was shoved without much ceremony deep into his aching rectum. He was finding it almost impossible to remain quiet. _ _

__Kaltherzig ignored him, picked up a heavy black camera gleaming with expensive precision. He took many pictures, some from inches from his skin, several between his legs, once tilting the thermometer agonizingly to one side for several frames._ _

__That lens, an inch from his eye, Kaltherzig so close he could smell something like candied violets on his breath, and the whisper "Don't blink...two...three..." and the blinding flash._ _

__The thermometer was withdrawn, consulted, deposited in a waiting bin of alcohol. Kaltherzig selected a terrifying handful of shiny pointed calipers. He laid these down on Erich everywhere, little cold metal pricks on his stomach, his hands, his face, photographing each resulting measurement._ _

__He measured each testicle separately, making Erich hiss in fear. Then his penis, too. The gentle grasp and the still lines of Kaltherzig's shoulder made him twitch and become sluggishly hard. A grin from Kaltherzig without comment, and a measurement for this, too._ _

__Kaltherzig came at him with tiny scissors, cut off a lock of his almostblack hair and tucked it in an envelope. Trimmed his nails in neat little curves with silver clippers. Fingerprinted him and daubed the blueviolet ink off his fingertips with cotton dipped in alcohol. Enough of the camera. Kaltherzig traded it for an empty large syringe with a long thick needle. He put on the tourniquet with quick careless pulls, took the vein in the crease of Erich's elbow._ _

__It set his teeth on edge, this cold little intrusion, and the pull as the syringe filled with dark blood. He exhaled until the needle was withdrawn, the bleeding stopped under the tourniquet knotted over a pinch of gauze. Then another syringe, loaded with a lot of something clear. "Anesthetic.”_ _

__He moved down again between Erich's knees._ _

__How they kept peeling away his layers of shock. He did not think Kaltherzig could possibly intend to do, that, until he felt the gloved fingers pinch open his anus and the first warning prick of the needle, just at the bottom. "No no no, no, please, no..."_ _

__He ground his teeth together too late. He'd forgotten._ _

__The needle was withdrawn._ _

__Kaltherzig peeled off one glove with his teeth, slapped the inside of Erich's right thigh in exactly the same place, hard hard hard, over and over til Erich was one long scream._ _

__"I'm going to have to teach you about that _no_ when we've more time. You're not learning that one fast enough." _ _

__He tried for _sorry_ a few times. He sniffled but his nose ran anyway. The pinching little spread, again. The needle, again. This time it was pushed straight into that drawstring-cord of muscle with a tearing little pop he could almost hear. _ _

__He couldn't scream. It was too specific, one beam of pain like the sunlight through an eyeglass lens, pinning him into this agonized arch. Kaltherzig pushed the plunger down. He could not be still, not that he could really move, but there was a sort of a blur of thrashing, tensing, braying out all sorts of unbelievable noise, too driven by instinct and pain to realize it was useless._ _

__Kaltherzig _tsked_ at him, reloading the syringe. "It's your own fault. You do all that squirming and it pulls the needle around inside you. Nobody to blame but yourself."_ _

__He gritted his teeth, screamed through them from the first pinch. This time it was the top of the ring, closest to his testicles. Kaltherzig seemed to angle it upwards almost under the skin, through such a thin edge of that muscle-cord he was afraid the needle would just tear through it. His arms were so tight they would ache the next day. From the waist down he tried to be paralyzed._ _

__Kaltherzig seemed to just shove the plunger in. His scream climbed in one jump to a pitch that tore him ragged in a second, silenced him in two._ _

__He withdrew it. Rubbed Erich's thighs from knees to groin and back again, a gesture so inappropriately kind it reduced Erich to trembling and tears._ _

__"All that over two little shots. Really." But he kept up the gentle squeezing strokes for a long moment before he pulled his glove on again, never taking those luminous eyes off his subject. That twisting pinch, the skin over this terrible hurt tweezed between Kaltherzig's fingernails. He wailed, strained miserably against the straps._ _

__"Are you numb?"_ _

__He wasn't numb. He was one blazing deep pain that seemed to have spread to everywhere between his legs. He shook his head, unable to answer any other way._ _

__"No? Mmm. Well, then you're control group. Saline or cottonseed oil." Kaltherzig shrugged, and picked up the most awful thing Erich had ever seen in his life. It resembled two steel shoehorns attached into the shape of a cone, with something at the wide end like a trigger. Kaltherzig pulled it. A loud click, and it snapped wide open. A speculum, though he did not know that word._ _

__Erich watched him lubricate it with something clear, and close it again._ _

__"Now this one is for a child, so I don't want to hear any complaining, or I'll use the one for adults."_ _

__He _yes sirred,_ barely able to speak above a whisper. His knees were pushed up farther, his feet up higher. He had already half-exhausted himself in pure tension. He was panting through his teeth, as if the pain had already come and he were already riding it. _ _

___Why must They always do things to you so you can't wipe your eyes or blow your nose? He should get a test tube and collect some tears._ _ _

___He's a doctor, they always do things to you that hurt you, everything they do, this is nothing different._ _ _

__He knew it was different, and he knew why. He thought that Kaltherzig did collect tears, just not in a test tube._ _

__The metal cone was not as bad as he'd feared. The edges seemed to threaten a cut without ever delivering one. It was so _cold._ Then the first click, and resentful sharp ache of this sore circle being spread. The strange sensation of air inside him, and the climbing sounds of protest he couldn't muffle. _ _

__"What did I say? You don't want the bigger one, do you?" Another click, a jolt that hurt a great deal more. He was spread much wider. He could feel himself trying uselessly to close, reflexes trying to push this awful thing out. His breath was coming faster._ _

__“You're only making this harder on yourself.”_ _

___Can he feel my pulse yet, through that thing, through the metal, through the glove?_ _ _

__"Stop that." A slap to the inside of his thigh, and then a pinch. Kaltherzig let it go inside him. "Don't push. I don't want to see it move."_ _

__The struggle to, slow his breath, because that was somehow part of it. It took a long time for him to relax, so that the speculum was still except for whatever invisible vibration it carried from his pulse._ _

__"Good boy." A stroke to his hair that made him crush his eyes closed. "Now you have to be just that still, or it will be worse. " The hand came away from his head. There was the sound of the wheeled stool, and hands on his thighs._ _

__A noise he could not identify. He stole one peek to see the gooseneck lamp being clicked on and swung closer to him. Blaze of warmth that was almost uncomfortable between his legs, in places he himself had never really seen. Humiliation that was as strong as nausea, as deep as horror, and the inescapable awareness that this heat was the weight of Kaltherzig's eyes._ _

__The speculum moved in him._ _

__He crushed his own eyes closed tight, again, but it wasn't much help._ _

__It didn't feel like Kaltherzig doing this to him. He could blame it all on the instrument. Rattle of more metal, and then something tiny and specific poking inside him. A pushing slow circle. Kaltherzig withdrew the long swab, dabbed it into a petri dish and picked up another swab._ _

__It didn't hurt, but he seemed to be methodically trying to swab, every inch, as far inside as he could reach. It was almost, but not quite, pleasant. And then he tilted the speculum, and that did hurt, like he imagined the first bits of death by impalement might hurt._ _

__Kaltherzig listened to all his begging as if it were a particularly amusing story. Erich chewed his lip, squeezed shut his eyes and cried._ _

__A last click. The speculum closed all at once inside him. It ached like stretching after too-long in too small a seat. A murmur from Kaltherzig. Instead of the withdrawal he expected, it turned inside him, the cold metal handle pressing into his bruised thigh. Kaltherzig clicked it open again, turned side-to-side instead of up and down._ _

__It was almost a relief to be open again, but the new pressures made him desperate to draw his knees up, higher. Kaltherzig pushed very low on his stomach, seeming to search for the edges of this thing through his flesh, shushed him when his volume started to climb._ _

__The swabs again, briefly. Kaltherzig sighed, clicked the speculum closed. The metal cone was withdrawn with one matter-of-fact slide that left him hissing again._ _

__"No use. You're almost too small for the next one up but this one won't do." A pat over the handprint on his thigh. Kaltherzig opened a drawer in the table underneath him. Rummaging. "No, only..."_ _

__That shrug. The dangerous smile-with-teeth._ _

__This speculum was longer, not so conical, duckbilled. "For women. It's the only other model we have here. Supply has been a nightmare." Still too much teeth, for Erich not to hear the joke underneath._ _

___He meant to use that on me, all along. He does this to_ _ _

___(all?)_ _ _

___of, us..._ _ _

__Kaltherzig opened that same clear thick cream, spread this steel set of lines._ _

__Erich could feel the forbidden no behind his teeth. He closed his eyes. The struggle rattled inside him like an earthquake._ _

__He could not let Kaltherzig do this, anymore. Something inside his sanity would break into pieces. He could feel it. The fear of the gun would not let him try to explain it, would not let him risk any more bruises._ _

__Kaltherzig seemed to_ _

___(enjoy)_ _ _

__want to keep him alive, and that seemed a great deal more hope than the skeleton men had. If he could only, let him_ _

___(hurt)_ _ _

__do, whatever it was he was trying to do_ _

___(for two years)_ _ _

__he could go home. Forget it. Or at least, keep it all where nobody could see it._ _

__"Sir?"_ _

__Kaltherzig looked as if it surprised him to be addressed. "Yes?" He never stopped applying something gleaming and wet to the speculum._ _

__"You said before that I was making it harder on myself. How can I, not?"_ _

__The laugh was different when they were alone. Less like a general sort of applause for the cleverness of the Reich and more like a real, laugh. "You're keeping yourself in pieces. You still expect to open your eyes in your very own room again."_ _

__Another tendril of certainty that Kaltherzig could read his mind._ _

__Pieces._ _

__Would it be worth whatever useless comfort he would win? Why defend each besieged piece from this SS totality until he was conquered one fragment at a time? He laughed himself, though it hardly sounded authentic._ _

__"How do I stop, sir?"_ _

__"Don't worry. I'll stop you."_ _

__The speculum nudged him in one cold warning, and slid inside._ _

__Push. Slide. The first click. This speculum opened in more of a V than the first one, pushing his spine and his bladder. He did a climbing frantic please, beginning to hyperventilate._ _

__Kaltherzig said "Be _still._ "_ _

__The second, click, and the spread._ _

___Stop me,_ he thought. His hands found the edges of the table and clung there by themselves. _ _

__Kaltherzig thumped the inside of Erich's thigh with one gloved hand. "See? That. Still trying. What are you making yourself ready for? What is the point of all this struggle?"_ _

__He hooked a finger in the restraint at Erich's knee, tugged at it in illustration. "Useless, and arrogant, to think you have anything to do with the future, now. You're still on your back."_ _

__His eyes stung at that last. _On your back,_ in his head like blows, breaking the shell between himself and the world. All this wasted struggle. There was a knotted set of seconds, while he tried to puzzle out how to stop trying. He exhaled and let himself hang, let straps cup him like a cold hand, let the steel just, spread him. _ _

__"Much better, good boy." A stroke along his thigh that ended with the side of Kaltherzig's hand against his scrotum. A pat. "It'll only hurt more if you're tense. That's always true." Almost to himself. His eyes were reaching that narrowed-focus of concentration. Erich thought again, of an artist immersed in a painting, of his own father's hands a blur of needle trailing thread._ _

__The speculum tilted. He gave a mournful worried cry._ _

__Kaltherzig murmured something that ended in _my boy,_ reached without looking, dragged the tray of instruments closer. He picked up a dangerous silver line that ended in a trigger, wobbled it between thumb and forefinger like a pencil, as if he were considering before he bent his head between Erich's knees again. A narrow little nudge inside him, strange without the warning-slide of entry first. _ _

__Those delicate little pushes til this cold metal nose was against his prostate._ _

__Trigger, and click._ _

__The pain was like a bite, specific and deep, and Kaltherzig withdrew it and there was a pull and another flare inside him like this minute bite had been torn off._ _

__It seemed silly to scream so long after the wound, and once he got his breath he only panted, eyes filling with tears because he felt tricked. Kaltherzig spared him another stroke or two along the inside of his thigh, did things with the probe and a tiny dish, closed and labeled it._ _

___He's recording me._ _ _

__A fingertip in an envelope of powder, and the speculum tilted. A feather of a touch inside him, a spreading burn that locked his teeth. Betrayed again._ _

__"It's only styptic, you're being a child. Would you rather bleed into a towel all day, like a girl, hmm? Stop all this noise."_ _

__The speculum was closed, withdrawn. The probe was dropped in a bin to be cleaned and a new one chosen. "Two more."_ _

__The _no_ was a nonevent, passing through him without tension. He was simply following it with another word, _no point, no good, no use, no hope.__ _

__The apathy was much safer._ _

__Kaltherzig grasped his left testicle between two fingers, nudged that one cold point hard against him, trigger, click._ _

__He was stricken silent. The reflex to draw up his knees dug the straps into his thighs. Nausea shook him like a fever, a heavy knot of sickness settling low in his stomach. A dip into that envelope again. Erich shook his head in spite of himself, feet turning uselessly in the stirrups. Kaltherzig laughed at him and did it anyway._ _

__"Last one." The emptying, the labeling, the second probe sloshed into the bin beside the first one. The third one picked up from the tray. His penis, held in one gloved hand. Pain like a thorn or a splinter of glass and that sensation of tearing again._ _

__The room seemed to have, tilted. He opened his eyes. Kaltherzig had the powder in his hand, was just patting in it with one fingertip. He lost anything approaching dignity, pleading and sobbing for him not to do it._ _

__The doctor never hesitated._ _

__Something in the center of his head closed. After all these hours of telling himself he was gone, it was finally true._ _

__

__**Figuren** _ _

__

__A sharp flare in his nose and the back of his throat that pulled him back into the world. He caught the ammonia-tang and wanted to scream in pure frustration. Of course it wasn't that easy. He could faint all he wished; this was a hospital, they could drag him into consciousness anytime they liked. There was no exit that way, either._ _

__Kaltherzig leaned over him, the corners of his mouth busy with amusement. "Welcome back. All rested now?"_ _

__"Are you...finished, sir?" He tried to swipe at his face, found himself already clean and unstrapped, still naked._ _

__"Only in here. Come on, now, we'll have you sit up until you can walk." He pulled Erich up, one hand behind his back keeping him upright. A deep resentful twinge inside him, that hurt he couldn't get away from. It reminded him of the pink triangle, and he thought that eventually they would have done so many things they might leave him alone to suffer without further effort._ _

__"Catch your breath. You're safe for the moment."_ _

__Kaltherzig picked up these three covered petri dishes, and carried them away to label them. Erich sat at the end of the table, aching. He didn't believe a word of it. He stood up, waiting for the hot angry little hurts to climb, moving in abbreviated gestures as if he'd been beaten, crying still thudding through him in brief bursts like little storms._ _

__He was dizzy. His stomach hurt again. He wanted a bathroom and pleaded something along those lines, wavering. It made Kaltherzig laugh. "No, not now. Come on, get up. Two steps."_ _

__Erich felt as if his head were floating independently of his body. Kaltherzig was almost carrying him. "Clothes..."_ _

__Another laugh. "Now, really. You'll have to get over this silly modesty of yours. No need, no time."_ _

__Kaltherzig opened the door, led him through the bright hallway. The floor was cold enough to make his feet hurt. He was pulled along in the wake of the white swish of Kaltherzig's coat. He was crimson from his scalp down._ _

__Nobody looked twice. He could not have said whether this made it better or worse._ _

__He felt very outnumbered, very small, very far from home. He kept himself covered with his cupped hands. It made him feel even more ridiculous, but he couldn't help it._ _

__He found himself missing Kaltherzig's house. Couldn't he do this there, without all these eyes, without all these people to hear his begging? What went on in this building, that nobody seemed even curious why he'd been screaming _that_ long?_ _

__Kaltherzig led him into a room so wide and empty it echoed. The door was closed and bolted behind them. The walls and the floor were painted flat gray. There were lights throwing a blaze into one corner, an assembly of shining hooks in the illuminated wall. A camera stood sentinel on a tripod._ _

__At the other end of the room was a small desk flanked by cabinets and refrigerators. An Untersturmführer sat here, all blond and blue, smoking with one foot propped up. He smiled and nodded and did a perfunctory _Heil Hitler_ at Kaltherzig, stood up lazily, stretched and wandered over to the camera, cigar still between his teeth. _ _

__"Lieser, this is my new one." Kaltherzig pulled him over to the camera, turned him as if he were a purchase._ _

__"The same impeccable taste as always." Lieser said in smoke._ _

__"Thank you."_ _

__Lieser's eyes were the color of an iceberg, and bright with something that might've been mischief and might've been madness. He studied Erich like a menu. The camera, too, was an eye, a black one that would not blink._ _

__He thought, _they'll just take my picture, that's all, that has to be all._ _ _

__He didn't believe it._ _

__Kaltherzig turned Erich and then pushed him into the circle of light, pressed on his shoulder til he went down on his knees on the concrete floor. Lieser tilted the black eye to follow him. There was a strange and upsetting smell in here, strong and sour and dangerous._ _

__"Oh, the fucking slide..." Kaltherzig left Erich kneeling there, with this frightening blond doll of a man already snapping pictures. He kept his hands over himself even though his back was to the camera. The crash of the shutter drowned out the sound of whatever Kaltherzig was doing._ _

__The doctor came back with a pane of glass, set it in front of his knees, dragged his hands impatiently away from his groin. He pushed on the back of Erich's neck until he leaned forward, pressed his face and shoulders to the floor, Lieser growled and then giggled somewhere Erich couldn't see. Kaltherzig pressed his waist to adjust the arch of his spine, pushed his knees apart. "Just like that. Don't move."_ _

__The floor was hospital-cold and his hands felt wrong no matter where he put them. He watched Kaltherzig's boots depart and then return. Kaltherzig dropped to one knee beside him to show him something long and strange. It was an iron bar as long and thick as a walking cane, but there was a carved wooden handle at each end._ _

___If he hits me with that he'll kill me._ _ _

__"Close your eyes." Kaltherzig was behind him, tapping this awful thing in his hand. He held it by one handle and stroked the other down Erich's spine, stopped, pushed. Pushed harder, and harder still.  
"Ignore the camera."_ _

__He wasn't allowed to say _no._ He wanted to say _sir_ or _please._ He drew in his breath. "God..."_ _

__"Just don't move, that's a good boy. Cry out all you like, there's no audio this time."_ _

__He didn't want to cry out._ _

__In the end he couldn't help it._ _

__It wasn't a handle at all. It was wood, carved into the rough shape of a phallus. It was dry, and considerably bigger inside him than Kaltherzig had been, and he was in so much pain already. He couldn't ignore the camera, the nasty little pop, the lightning flash, the knowledge that whatever instant that flare illuminated would be recorded for thousands of eyes._ _

__It felt wedged inside him. He chewed the backs of his hands, tried to keep his ass up while keeping his back straight. Kaltherzig would say, "No, _arch,_ " and tilt the stick inside him, wobble it side to side till he screamed, relent with thudding easy motions that made Erich think of a man breaking up soil with a shovel. He had to keep his knees straight under him, or the pushing would drive him down. He could feel his knees already scraped. _ _

__"Is that deep enough for you?" The smirk underneath his voice, and Lieser laughed behind him, camera clicking. The phallus pushed deeper, Kaltherzig leaning his weight into it. "There's a bigger one around here somewhere, shall I—" and laughed himself, through the string of _please_ and _don't_ and _sir._ He went back to that lazy agonizing thudding, tilted it until the involuntary arch and the throat-open scream let him know it was hitting Erich's prostate. _ _

__"There? Mmm? Stay over the slide or I'll tear you."_ _

__"You're going to tear him anyway," Lieser said. "Admit it."_ _

__“Meanwhile, no one is manning the camera,” Kaltherzig told him. The bar tilted inside him. There was another kind of laugh as if they were having a teasing scuffle over possession of the handle, before Kaltherzig straightened it and went back to fucking him with it._ _

__Erich sobbed, watching Kaltherzig's boots between his bleeding knees. He stayed over the slide, a rectangle that gave him back the ghost of his naked stomach and his shuddering erection. Every push made him, harder, in spite of the cold, in spite of the eyes. The climb started by itself, pulling him along, farther and farther and farther til he was no longer exactly thinking._ _

__Faster. Faster. Kaltherzig twisted it inside him and he screamed until it stung his throat. Every push felt like a fist against that place that seemed to be the other end of his cock. The flash was so bright he could see it with his eyes closed._ _

__He did not want that thunderous, hideous pleasure. His body didn't care what he wanted, traitorous thing that it was. Something wrong and delicious coiled low in his belly, unwound itself higher until he was making fists and making embarrassing noises. It was all tangled in his head with these new eyes on him, with the shame of the camera, with Kaltherzig so tall and so silent above him. At the end all he could feel was something like a bright red string from the tip of his cock all the way up to Kaltherzig's hands, miserable unending hurt, terrifying new bliss._ _

__At the end he almost understood what would happen._ _

__He screamed in new registers at the edge of the revelation, terrified of the plunge he could sense approaching. Nothing changed. He broke down in a _please_ that trailed away into silence as the fall took him and he could only shake, suspended. _ _

___I'm dying._ _ _

__It arced through him again, the worst delight imaginable, a cataclysm that would not let him go, centered in that place where Kaltherzig was slamming inside him with that terrible thing, over and over._ _

__It was his first orgasm._ _

__Underneath it all was the anonymous strange splatter, and the splashes on the glass blocking his reflection, and the erection behind them twitching, wilting._ _

__The bar was drawn out, as if Kaltherzig were pulling back a spear. One last scream at this frictioned scrape. Kaltherzig leaned over him. For a moment Erich thought he was going to embrace him, but he only picked up the glass, careful not to tilt it. "Good boy." That, those two words, were somehow worse than all that had come before, and they both comforted him and fractured him into new tears._ _

__Kaltherzig carried his sample over to the workspace in the corner._ _

__Erich turned his head, blinked away blurry tears to watch Kaltherzig put on new gloves, do delicate things with his sperm and a tiny silver spatula and miniature glass vials. He pasted on labels the size of postage stamps, putting everything in the locked refrigerators already teeming with jars._ _

__Lieser took lazy pictures behind him. Erich wept._ _

__

__"It's taking much too long that way." Kaltherzig came to stare down at Erich, peeling off these thin light gloves, pulling on new ones of black rubber so thick the fingers were like the fingers of a mannequin, featureless. "Get up. We'll try something faster." He pulled Erich closer to the restraints bolted to the wall._ _

__Lieser snapped one last picture—Erich in a line of distress with one hand stretched so far overhead that he was on tiptoe, while Kaltherzig buckled a rubber-coated manacle around his left wrist. There was semen in a wet cooling line down his left thigh._ _

___(they're, working, this is a day at work for them, God)_ _ _

__The restraints closed inexorably, taking him away from himself one piece at a time. Wrists, chest, waist, knees, ankles, even his neck, all in that same rubbercoated immovable style. Erich was almost hanging, feet arched to keep his toes on the floor in a way he knew he had no chance of sustaining. He pulled against them, dizzy, pushed with his buttocks and his back against the bricks behind him. An inch or so was all the space he had left in the world. His shoulders were aching already._ _

__Kaltherzig wheeled over a cart heavy with a box of switches and dials, a snaketangle of cords slowly stretching taut behind him. He hummed to himself, something like Orff that Erich couldn't place, rubbed cream from a jar over tiny circles hooked to wires that fed back into the machine. It looked, like...a short-wave radio, maybe? Erich was terrible at machines under the best of circumstances. He could not imagine the purpose of this one, only that there would be pain, and would this ever be over?_ _

__"How is your bladder?"_ _

__"My.....sir?"_ _

__A sigh, that dangerous impatience._ _

__"Bladder, full, empty, which?" He came to Erich and pressed with tented fingers just above his pelvic bone, making him squirm. "Never mind, that won't do."_ _

__Kaltherzig picked up a handful of things that dripped a black rubber bulb and tubing, and a clear IV bag. "Saline, electrolytes, actually almost what we use for blood loss. It conducts perfectly." He put the bag down in a gleaming jellyfish heap on the instrument table, dipped into his inescapable jar and greased this long narrow black tube._ _

__He brought it closer, watching Erich's eyes, closed gloved fingers around his penis, pinched the head. "It'll go in easier if you relax."_ _

__Once the very end of the tube slid into the tip of his urethra he couldn't, move, anyway, only shake and feel this slippery spreading burn move farther and farther up the shaft of his penis._ _

__He was doing the _please_ but he'd done so much of that since the Gestapo that it was becoming noise without sense. Wasn't that what everyone said to the Nazis, all the time? They could just make it the official polite greeting, it would save so much time…_ _

__The tube slid in deeper. The camera flared over Kaltherzig's shoulder. "You'll feel something, like a pinch, inside, and then it will be over—"_ _

__This promised pinch was the worst pang of hurt and burn and the need to urinate or push or shriek there had ever been. Then that knot of nerves Kaltherzig had driven to orgasm by stroking was _impaled_ by this wide slippery tube. He shook, silenced, eyes frozen wide open. He was paralyzed by a sense of _give,_ opening, in a place inside him so tiny and deep that nothing, nobody, should ever have been able to touch him there. It felt obscene. _ _

__The disassociation was failing him, destroyed by that piercing specific pain, that inescapable sense of a virginity, lost, of this new thing fucking him in this new place. He could not think of it as the instrument's fault. It felt unmistakably like Kaltherzig inside him. Twitching little try of his cock to harden again, squeezing around the tube._ _

__That awful muffled pop of a flashbulb, and a violet afterimage burned into his streaming eyes on top of dozens of other blue mirage circles._ _

__He cried and pushed his hips against the wall, away from that penetration, so hard he would later find bruises there. There was nowhere to get away from it. This hand in this gleaming black glove kept pushing the tube. A deep strange slide. There was an angry burning point inside him where that miniscule valve had been forced to spread. Kaltherzig wobbled it a little, until it was set exactly right. The pushing stopped. "There."_ _

__Kaltherzig picked up the bulb. Watched Erich's face, thumb and forefinger still holding the tube inside him. Squeezed it. A heartless mechanical _spread,_ in a place so private he could not visualize it._ _

__Grayness spread behind Erich's eyes—and retreated. No escape that way, either. A tug so the bulb inside him pushed hopelessly at the entrance to his bladder. Then the IV bag and the spreading sensation of cold, the bag squeezed in Kaltherzig's hand held high overhead. In seconds he was in that mindless place again, squirm, scream. The tube was clamped and the bag removed from it. His bladder was so full and so immune to his pushes that he could only hang, dying to kick or draw up his knees, afraid that something inside him would rupture._ _

__Fingers lifted his penis, daubed something cool on him, pressed tiny rubber contacts to his skin until they stuck. More tugging at the catheter. He kept his eyes closed, thinking _no no no, he can't stop me saying it inside my head, that's a little help, just a little._ _ _

__It was no help at all, and involuntary seizures of motion shook all through him, as if Erich meant to pull himself free. Both SS men laughed, at this frail furious struggle._ _

__"You're making it harder on yourself again." That balanced doctor voice, blasphemously normal._ _

__"What would you have me do? Sir?" It sounded like a flippant sort of death-wish in his own ears._ _

__More of that laughter. "He has you there, Ahren." Lieser, smirking. More flashbulb, and a lazy plume of cigar smoke._ _

__"So true. Well, my boy, you're right, I suppose. Kick all you like."_ _

__Those tiny rubber pads, one at the head of his penis, one very close to his body, underneath the shaft. One on either side of his scrotum, Kaltherzig nudging this delicate flesh with his fingertip. He leaned back, nodded at this arrangement and pulled the wheeled cart with the dreadful black box, bristling with knobs and dials, inset with a gleaming face of gauges._ _

__Lieser had given up the tripod and was orbiting them like a carrion bird with the camera, illuminating them with lightning-colored flares. Most of Erich's hate was reserved for this perfect Aryan bastard, this observer that was changing what he observed. With the eyes in Berlin through the camera. Kaltherzig was missing that absent-minded kindness, missing those low-water marks when the cruelty waned._ _

__The first edge of current was so faint Erich thought he was imagining the vibration. Then a sharp climb in volume, an edged thing like the cold chill when glass splintered into an unsuspecting thumb. It did not hurt where the pads were, or along his skin, but through him. And worse, it did not exactly...hurt. He did not have a word for this sensation. He closed his eyes again, half panting through his teeth, expecting much worse at any second._ _

__This motion climbed, razorsharp edge of a high note buzzing from the base of his penis to the tip, cupped in a heartless hand around his scrotum. Then a swarm of invisible knives climbed through skin and nerve in a jagged blur. He lost one ungainly noise. The uncanny sting split frequencies, a thudding inevitable rhythm underneath. And here was the hurt he'd been waiting for. Another climb. Faster, harder, deeper. It was burning him, now. It must be. He would smell it soon enough._ _

__He was tempted to hate both of them, in the few thinking places he had left. There was an eternity, hanging in darkness, in a place like the state before sleep, the pain unimaginable, so large it was absurd, an unprecedented thing he could not really believe in. The screaming was thrown back at him from all these concrete walls. Flashes painted the black world intermittent purple._ _

__He thought there was silence, until he realized it was only the electricity stopping. It took a long time for his cries to catch up, his limbs were still shaking with the ghost of those jittering knives._ _

__"I suppose that's enough playing. Are we ready to begin?"_ _

__He did a pointless sway against the restraints. He was trying to shake his head when Kaltherzig began it. The current drew those same buzzing lines through his flesh, but softer, smoother. The rise and fall was faster, stroking in impossible places by a thousand miniature hands. He dared not let down his guard. He could not forget how quickly those hands could become knives. He watched Kaltherzig nudge one dial and then another. He was gasping and the erection was, mindless, not his fault, unstoppable._ _

___(at least before it was, him, doing this to me, this is just being DONE to me, just for that camera, just)_ _ _

__Kaltherzig was standing very near him, smirking at his struggle. He fought for so long that Kaltherzig reached for the dials again. He screamed his way through a punishing blur: thuds like the heel of a hand striking between his legs faster than anyone could possibly swing; a fusillade of blows from imaginary tiny hammers inside the shaft of his penis, a lightning quake that made him scream and scream, just four excruciating pulses that made him leak a tiny bit of fluid in spite of the tube wedged inside him._ _

__"Oh, I forgot." A laugh. He hadn't forgotten. The bulb inside him deflated. Kaltherzig pulled. The flash went off again._ _

__He found enough rage to think _not going to scream, not this time._ What was left of the balloon hit this valve in the center of everything. Spread. Slide. The pain was like nothing had ever been. He clung to this silence, every muscle cable-tight._ _

__"Don't you dare," came the whisper. Kaltherzig gave him a mean push with tented fingers, just over his pubic bone, making him grind his teeth so hard to keep back the scream there was a sound like coal over concrete._ _

__Kaltherzig hissed and pinched the tip of his cock between thumb and forefinger, thick rubber gloves squeaking against his skin. He writhed, the machine at a thick terrible purr he could feel in his teeth, in his lungs, blazing everywhere he was most afraid of being_ _

___(petted)_ _ _

__hurt until he could feel it starting again and he closed his eyes and mouth and ears and thoughts and this time there was none of that climbing pleasure, none of that overwhelming deliciousness he remembered._ _

__“You will, you know,” Kaltherzig told him. “You won't be able to help it.”_ _

__He couldn't help it._ _

__This orgasm was more like a sneeze or a cramp, without pleasure, without control, and he felt Kaltherzig's fingers replaced with cool glass, opened his eyes and saw the cameraflash imprint the doctor's narrow shadow on the floor, hand and the line of a test tube intersecting Erich's shadow between his legs._ _

__More black._ _

__His hair was wet in his eyes, stinging with sweat. Kaltherzig was labeling a second tiny flask of his sperm and putting it away. The machine was off, but there was a hot trembling sense of damage inside him, as if he had been deafened._ _

__Lieser applauded for long enough to make his point, before wandering out leaking blue smoke through his grin. Kaltherzig laughed and sketched an elaborate bow at his vanishing back._ _

__Kaltherzig came to Erich at once and did little miserable tugs until the contacts were removed and coiled and neatly laid on the cart beside the black box. He unfastened Erich's ankles, unfastened his arms and caught him like an armload of clothes. Erich wanted to thank him, but his mouth seemed as vibratory as the rest of him, buzzing as though possessed by bees._ _

__Kaltherzig half-carried him to the chair behind the desk. His head swung forward and thudded into Kaltherzig's shoulder, and he wanted to apologize, or was it thank you? He was shaking as if the electricity had left traces inside him, jittering back and forth without the wires to run away into. He drew in a breath, and when he managed to talk it was "Please, don't, please, sir," in a strange staccato, as if he were stuck on five minutes ago._ _

__Kaltherzig clapped him on the back and took the cart away. He came back with a silver flask open in his hand. He offered it, and gave up aiming for Erich's unsteady hand and held it to his mouth. Erich drank, eyes stinging, stomach heaving. Warmth spread through his chest, and he could feel his heartbeat in his face. Kaltherzig drank himself, casually, and re-capped it._ _

__He could not walk. The best he could manage was a wavering stumble. Kaltherzig had that inescapable grip of his upper arm, and that was just enough to keep him from falling. He was very aware he was still naked, but his arms were too heavy to bring up his hands and cover himself. Did it matter now? Now, after the camera?_ _

__He was quite sure Kaltherzig was taking him back to that table dripping straps, and that could not be, because after that they would go back to that room behind him, and he could not do that again, not ever._ _

__He had been afraid of Kaltherzig before. He had no word for how he felt about the doctor now. Fear did not begin to approach it. Perhaps it was something like worship._ _

__He thought of the great statues of Egypt, towering inhuman and immovable, and then of the table again. He'd almost followed that thought to _The Room again_ and was making a small repeated sound when Kaltherzig steered him through a door into a tiny new room. Bare concrete walls, there were three cots, all empty, and a metal toilet that Erik rushed for without asking, without thinking. _ _

__Kaltherzig let him, laughing._ _

__There was a frightening moment where he was afraid he couldn't, where he was helplessly aware of Kaltherzig behind him, of the door open behind both of them, and then the discovery that yes, he could still urinate, and that yes, he was wounded in a bright indignant deep place inside him that stung like a match held too long. Erich flushed away pink water, shaking hands and empty mind. He had no idea what to do next, and that fact held him in place, waiting to be told._ _

__Kaltherzig took his arm, led him to one of the cots. There was a blanket, and then there was a needle._ _


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This happens much later than the previous material. 
> 
> Solstice party. 
> 
> Do not read this. It is extremely bad for your soul.

**Schwelgerei**

 

By the second week of December, Block 10 seemed nearly deserted. Most of the doctors were gone, and those who remained left the patients to the nurses. Mengele was gone, as were Clauberg and Wirths, and this left Kaltherzig nominally in charge. There was little to be in charge of. 

One morning he presented Erich with ice skates, and they went not to work but to a pond just outside the camp, hard frozen. Erich was terrible at it, and by the time he worked out how to mostly keep his feet under him he had quite a few new bruises to add to his collection. Kaltherzig was graceful, but rusty. He managed to avoid the kind of impressive and undignified falls Erich was undertaking, though he had to scramble to avoid them a time or two. They spent until long after lunchtime gliding in increasingly less hazardous arcs across the ice. 

They went into Block 10 after a leisurely early dinner, and then Kaltherzig locked them both in his office, and made them both hot cider with Schnapps over a Bunsen burner, and told him stories of learning to ice-skate with a handful of older brothers trying to knock him down on every side. 

Small gifts were exchanged. Kaltherzig was given candy and sweets that seemed to exasperate him. He gave these to Erich, who gave most of them to Adelle. It wasn't guilt, exactly, more a wish to have no enemies in the hospital. She gave him a bright smile, and he supposed he'd chosen wisely. 

 

On Solstice morning Erich got up and discovered a stocking nailed on the mantle for him, crammed with bulges that turned out to be maple-stick candy and oranges and a book on Egypt and a polished-wood box that opened into a tiny ornate board and carved chessmen. Below this was a small footlocker, and in it were Beowulf and Faust and a suit exactly his size in a deep cold gray. 

Kaltherzig denied it. "It was Saint Nicholas. I would've left you switches and coal," he said, perfectly airy, expressionless. 

 

Erich had expected to be homesick today, and when that didn't happen he found himself almost trying to be homesick. Solstice had never been a particularly grandiose occasion with his parents, and he had sometimes wondered what it might be like if he'd had brothers or sisters. This felt like a real holiday, full of busy excitement. 

Kaltherzig sent him to wash and dress, with orders to admit two maids, a cook, and several servers as they arrived. Kaltherzig himself was going into Block 10, but only to put in an appearance.

As soon as the door had closed behind the doctor Erich was halfway up the stairs, working at the buttons of his shirt. He kept his uniform spotlessly clean, but it was the only clothing he had, and there was nothing he could do for months of wear without respite. He had always been painstakingly neat in his dress, and the desire to be dressed like a

_(human being)_

citizen again was like an itch between himself and these prisoner clothes. 

Kaltherzig came home at half-past four; three women in neat restaurant dress buzzing around the kitchen and the dining room. Erich had retired to the den, dressed, his own shoes and Kaltherzig’s dress boots just polished to glossy black. That one earned him a clap on the shoulder that didn’t hurt. 

He looked up, hair wet and slick, newspaper between himself and his one remaining shoe, and Kaltherzig seemed to, stop, just staring at him. He was in the black dress uniform, glinting in that sinister way that made Erich remember the weight of that SS coat on his back, the slippery evilness of it. Erich hadn't even known the doctor was in the room, He was half-certain he'd misunderstood a blow. 

The way Kaltherzig was looking at him nearly stopped his heart. The doctor's face was almost expressionless. It was only his eyes that had changed, those gunmetal impenetrable eyes. 

Somehow they were, warmer. 

Softer. 

Erich drew in a breath to speak, and found he had no words to reply to that look. 

Kaltherzig's mouth moved, as though he had the very same problem. Then there was only another touch on Erich's shoulder, and then his hair. Kaltherzig tipped up his face, and Erich leaned his head back, expecting to be examined. 

The doctor only said, “Come with me,” and pulled him to his feet, down the hall and into the bedroom. 

Kaltherzig opened a wardrobe and pulled Erich to stand in front of the full-length mirror in the door. He stood behind Erich and knotted Erich's sharp new tie with intricate black-on-black patterning, straightened his collar. In the mirror they gleamed next together. 

"Like father and son." 

“You're not old enough to be my father,” Erich said, and immediately dreaded the response, but Kaltherzig only laughed.

“How would you know? I always was...precocious. And experimental.”

Kaltherzig ruined Erich's smooth hair by plunking his own uniform cap on top.

The house filled with the wolves rather quickly. Erich found himself surrounded by uniforms. There was a very long and very formal dinner, during which Erich drank too much red wine. He found himself pinned again, Mengele on one side and Kaltherzig on the other. Even worse, Lieser was across from him. 

Erich could not look at him without blushing bright red. He knew wherever all those photographs had gone, far more eyes than this blonde demon's had seen him, had seen _everything,_ but he didn't have to endure dinner parties with any of those strangers grinning at him. Kaltherzig leaned close to whisper praise for his manners and the breath in his ear gave him an erection that left him in fear of being called to stand for a toast or a song. 

After dinner Mengele left, and then Clauberg, and then others Erich didn't know by name. Kaltherzig's hired staff cleared the table, fluttered here and there until everyone was settled with drinks and cards, and then left themselves. Someone started the phonograph. There were new arrivals, some already quite drunk. Erich was glad to see the help gone. Now he had something to do, keeping glasses filled and ashtrays emptied. 

The party swelled, and then shrank again, into a milling and increasingly noisy little swarm, some settled in the dining room, some in the living room talking and smoking. 

Lieser even swiped at Erich once as he went by, in what was probably a drunken attempt at a pinch. 

Everyone laughed except Kaltherzig. 

"That's not exactly becoming of an officer, you know."

"What, making a try at a boy?"

"Making a try at _my_ boy." Kaltherzig drew Erich closer, and put an empty glass in his hand to refill. “What will our guests think?”

“Most of _those_ guests are gone,” Lieser pointed out, and got his own laughter. And right about then was when Erich began to develop the strong wish to be sent to bed. He was fairly sure he knew what Lieser meant, and it did not exactly fill him with a sense of safety. The dread did him no good. Foresight was useless when you had no free will, and so he filled glasses and found matches and drank when someone insisted he should, and many did. He told himself he was being ridiculous, that everyone seemed to be in a wonderful mood, and that included Kaltherzig, and the briefly raised voices that seemed on the verge of an argument were quickly calmed into laughter again. He told himself it was nothing like the swimming pool, and that, at least, turned out to be true. 

The roaring fire soon warmed the house from comfortable to distressing, and Erich took off his new coat once he saw that others had begun to do the same. Kaltherzig laughed when he saw this, and pulled Erich close to his chair, til he was standing between the doctor's knees. He unbuttoned each of Erich's sleeves and rolled them up, and then loosened his tie. The card game went on around them. 

“I'll buy him from you.” Lieser offered Kaltherzig a handful of poker chips. 

“Not for sale. I'd never find a replacement.” Kaltherzig was unbuttoning Erich's collar. “This one is too obedient.”

“How obedient?”

And that was when Kaltherzig's eyebrow went up. Erich had time to think Goddamn you, Lieser, and then Kaltherzig's finger hooked into his collar, turned him, and drew him down into Kaltherzig's lap. His hands came down on the doctor's knees, and he snatched them away, teetered on the edge of spilling himself onto the floor, and then grasped the arms of the chair. 

Once he was stable he immediately tried to stand again, a scalding blush climbing from his throat to his face. Kaltherzig's arms came around him. One hand covered his throat, not squeezing, but keeping him straight and still so the others could see his face. That was bad enough. Eyes were infinitely worse than cameras, he discovered, and the fact that a few were still talking to one another, apparently aware of and not particularly interested in this drama made it worse and not better. It made him feel distinctly unreal. 

Kaltherzig held his head still. “Don't move,” 

Erich felt the doctor's hand on his stomach and then felt his belt buckle tugged at. He thought perhaps Kaltherzig had gone mad. Lieser was, for once, not laughing. He watched with those eerily pale eyes wide and pleased. 

Obedient. 

Erich didn't move, except to swallow, and he felt his throat press against Kaltherzig's palm. It made him swallow again. Kaltherzig unfastened Erich's belt with two sharp tugs, unbuttoned his pants—and then slid his hand down the front of them, skin against skin so fast it was almost a collision. 

Erich tried to keep still, but his body jerked in spite of his wishes, and apparently he was still not drunk enough to prevent an erection. The fact that this could not possibly happen now in front of all these eyes did nothing to stop it. He thought Kaltherzig was going to seize the waistband of his underwear and pull it. This had been regarded as the height of humor in some of his school classes, and Kaltherzig seemed to be in the mood to play. Instead Kaltherzig's hand slid past this, too, and wrapped around both of his balls, warm and sudden. 

The sound Erich made started that inescapable laughter again. Lieser still didn't join in. 

This is how he looks behind the camera. If Kaltherzig is a bird, this one is a snake. 

He whispered, “Sir, there are people,” and watched Lieser grin at his horror. 

“Yes,” Kaltherzig's voice, his breath, whiskey and tobacco and heat, so very near Erich's ear. “And you hate that. Don't move. Keep your hands just where they are.” And he spread Erich's knees with his own, and brought his free hand up to cover Erich's mouth. 

Erich clung to the arms of the chair as if he would drown without it, every muscle locked tight. He thought he won't, he can't, I can't. 

And then he squeezed Erich's balls, very slowly, and very hard. 

The pressure became an unfolding, deep, sick pain that quickly climbed into anguish. He managed about ten seconds before he began to scream into Kaltherzig's hand. 

Lieser pretended to applaud him. 

Erich kept his hands where they were but he could not control his legs, and when his knees came up Kaltherzig struggled with him briefly and then wrapped his legs around Erich's until they were too tangled to kick, and closed his hand harder, and let him scream. When he had to stop screaming to breathe he could hear them laughing, more of them applauding with Lieser, in little staccato bursts. 

Something went wrong in his throat, and this noise was more howl than scream, and his hands still clung to the arms of the chair, though his arms seemed to be trying to pull them free. Tremors of motion shook his body. Kaltherzig was hard underneath him. The doctor did something new with his hand—a roll of his fingers, a slow merciless pull, and Erich could not scream anymore, because the pain boiling low in his stomach rolled upwards into his throat. Kaltherzig felt him gag, and eased his grip, just as slowly as he'd tightened it. 

Erich collapsed, head back against Kaltherzig's shoulder, cold with sudden sweat. He croaked, “God,” and then “Don't.” Both were equally unintelligible. He gave up. 

Kaltherzig's hand was cupping his head, the hand between his legs cupping too, gentle and warm and intolerable. “One more.”

Erich wanted to gag again. “Don't.”

“Keep your hands there.”

“Cover my mouth!” he begged, in desperate panic.

“No.”

“May I?” Lieser inquired, sweetly. 

Erich groaned in his throat at that, and almost thrashed in Kaltherzig's arms. 

“Yes,” said Kaltherzig, and Erich could hear the grin. He'd done that to himself, he realized, and then Lieser stood and he closed his eyes. 

Lieser was expert and gentle, cupping the back of his head with one hand and pressing the other over his mouth smoothly and firmly. He said, “No, open your eyes,” and when Kaltherzig did not countermand this order, Erich did. 

The scent of Lieser made him frantic and furious, but the pain was quick and obliterating, dragging more of that desperate hysterical howl up from deep in his chest. He forgot everything except that in some other universe he must not let go of something he could no longer feel. Then he lost hold of even that, peeled down to id, and his arms dragged both his hands away from the chair. 

There were almost shouts from his audience, half disappointment, half a cheer. He seized Kaltherzig's wrist and discovered that this did no good whatsoever, unless he wanted to pull, which he definitely did not want. He wanted to shriek in frustration, but what happened instead was more of a wail. 

Kaltherzig made some sound Erich could feel more than hear at that, “You know what will make me stop, now, don't you?” Kaltherzig murmured, very close to his ear, so that no one else could hear it. He knew. It was simple and awful and he didn't want to do it, but he knew. He let go of Kaltherzig's wrist, put his hands back on the arms of the chair. It made him cry to do it.

Kaltherzig loosened his hand almost at once. “Let him go,” he told Lieser. And oh, dear God, Kaltherzig was letting go too, and Erich relaxed too soon, panting and gasping and thinking I have to get out of his lap, or he'll do it again. 

Kaltherzig paused, his hand still hidden in Erich's pants, and pinched the head of his cock, just once, fast and hard and over by the time Erich could yell about it. 

Then Kaltherzig was fastening Erich's belt again while he struggled to draw up his knees. The pain in his stomach was vast and poisonous. 

“You'll live,” Kaltherzig murmured, close to his ear. He pushed Erich forward. He expected to be able to stand and found himself wrong, and sat down again, gasping. He wanted to curl himself up, would probably die if he couldn't curl himself up around that ache.

“Lieser, take our wounded to my room.” 

“No!” Complete panic. He fumbled at Kaltherzig, trying to cling to him, but Lieser pulled him to wobble on his feet and kept him from falling. “Sir, you take me, please--”

“I will be there when I get there, and we'll discuss that no.”

 

Lieser did nothing more than steer him out of the party. A few guests tried to either tease or congratulate him, but Lieser steered him around these and down the hallway, and after a bit of a tangle in the doorway he was herded into Kaltherzig's dim quiet bedroom. And then he was in the bed, Kaltherzig's wide cool bed, sprawled across it gasping and shaken. 

He managed to turn over, because having Lieser at his back felt completely unsafe. Lieser grinned down at him and then licked the palm of the hand he'd used to cover Erich's mouth. 

“I wouldn't have stopped, you know,” he said, slowly and softly and very sincerely, with the music of madness in every word. 

Then he performed an elaborately drunken turn and wandered back out into the hallway.

It was quiet, and he was alone. Lieser had left the door open and he could hear the distant party. 

He investigated between his legs with both hands, found no blood, pondered reaching the bathroom to be sick, or the floor instead of the bed, and did neither. He panted and trembled in struggle against the misery in his stomach. It seemed to wax and wane in time with nothing he could understand. 

He thought, privileged favorite, and wheezed something that might've been laughter. That made him think of the little crowd, of the sound they'd made when he'd finally moved his hands. As if he'd been something to bet on, a racehorse or an athlete. That put a stop to the laughter, and that was just as well, because sometimes laughing by himself made him wonder if he might be going insane. And then he remembered discuss that no, and buried his face in the bed. 

 

It was the shoes that woke him, first the left and then the right gently drawn off his feet. Having his socks drawn off made him kick one ticklish foot, and Kaltherzig said, “Welcome back,” and it told Erich two things. First, that the doctor was quite drunk, and second, that he was very, very dangerous at the moment. 

Erich pushed himself up on one elbow. The room was illuminated only by the light in the hall, the door still open. Kaltherzig chose that moment to grasp Erich's ankles and drag him closer, so he could reach Erich's belt buckle. 

Very dangerous. 

He hated being told to take off his clothes, but surely this was worse. Flicker of that bath, the very first night, of being moved as though he hadn't the sense to follow orders. “Sir.” When that made Kaltherzig neither hurry nor wait, he tried, “Sir, I'm sorry.”

“I know.” He unbuttoned Erich's pants, drew them down and off with his underpants still inside them. The dragging, twisting pull of it sprawled him out on his face, shirt and tie crumpled under his arms, and the bed was cool and wide, and he thought, he'll fuck me, that's all it is, and knew that it wasn't. Kaltherzig pulled him again, so that his legs hung down over the side of the bed. He heard Kaltherzig's belt clear the loops and turned his face into the bed, grasped two handfuls of white bedspread. 

The doctor had struck him before, usually with his hand, sometimes with the riding crop, but this was entirely different from either, a wide bright sudden hurt, shockingly loud. Kaltherzig swung the belt fast and hard, and Erich climbed from fear to fury to more apologies in a matter of seconds. None of it changed anything. Kaltherzig only went on hitting him. He pushed himself up without meaning to. 

“No one told you to get up.” 

The belt never paused. He dropped down onto his face again, and Kaltherzig swung harder, faster, and he gave in to it, finding that place where there was no trying. He was crying hopelessly when Kaltherzig stopped, and something about it was good. He'd wanted to cry before, but his eyes had been dry and hot, and it was a relief to do it now. 

“Do you understand why I'm hitting you?”

He swallowed and sobbed, and managed, “For telling you no.”

“And?”

Panic climbed in him. He didn't know. Then, “For moving my hands?”

“Good boy. Put your knees under you.”

He muffled one grieved sound. He was hard, and Kaltherzig would see. Well, he'd done enough thrashing that surely he already had. Erich crawled up onto the bed, stopped on his hands and knees, his shirttails and his tie hanging down between his arms, waiting to see if this was what Kaltherzig had in mind. It wasn't. Kaltherzig pushed his head down, and he obeyed, wincing at how ridiculous it made him feel to keep his ass in the air this way, but now certain there would be sex and then sleep. 

The belt, again. Slowly, now, but each one so hard it made him shriek in anguish. He didn't struggle. He deserved them. He hadn't been perfect. Something about this too, was good, the noise of it and the pain of it, some stranger kind of relief. Kaltherzig would stop soon, he had to, and when he didn't it only melted Erich further into tears and stillness. 

After forever, Kaltherzig dropped the belt beside his head. Erich felt the mattress dip, as Kaltherzig sat beside him, a blur, ivory skin and open shirt. The doctor startled him badly by putting both cool hands on his buttocks, neither hitting nor rubbing, just pressing lightly. He closed his eyes in relief, thinking, _now he'll fuck me._ He waited for Kaltherzig to open the drawer beside his bed. Instead the doctor tugged at one of his knees, made him spread them further apart, and then slid his hand between Erich's legs. 

Erich's eyes opened in wide shock, and Kaltherzig stroked his cock, in dry light feathery grazes. “Such interest,” he said, softly, and Erich groaned and hid in the bed. “No, turn back so I can see your face.”

He did. He dared a look up at Kaltherzig. The predatory interest in those gray eyes caught him. Kaltherzig smiled at him, the slow one that ended in teeth. Still dangerous. He kept stroking, too gently to do more than madden Erich, and then he stroked the tip of his cock with one fingertip, toying with the moisture there. 

Erich wailed and meant to hide his face again, but the “Don't,” stopped him, kept him caught in those eyes. Kaltherzig rubbed a wet circle and then drew a trail of dampness back to Erich's balls. He had time for disbelief, and then Kaltherzig wrapped his hand around them, firmly enough to make him hiss. He felt outraged there still, swollen and sullen, tight and vulnerable. 

“Let's see what you've learned about no.”

He was shaking. He'd stopped associating that with fear and had begun to regard it almost as a premonition, a sixth sense that warned of him of oncoming anguish. “Yes, sir.”

(testing me, all the time)

“Do you want me to do it again?”

His teeth clicked together. Kaltherzig laughed at the sound Erich made when he realized the trap he was caught in. He thought of risking clever and saying something like I wish you wouldn't, but if he lied, Kaltherzig would know. 

And he deserved it. He'd failed before, and he would do better this time. 

“Yes, sir.”

He was very glad he hadn't closed his eyes again, because he got to watch Kaltherzig sigh, watch his elegant face change. Erich only got that look when Kaltherzig was very pleased with him. 

“Have I found something you hate, my boy?” He did a warning pull that made Erich want to rock back on his knees. He got new handfuls of bedspread, spread his knees as wide as he could, trying to find that moveless place inside him, the place where there was no struggle. 

“Do I need to tell you to keep still?”

He'd almost fallen into that one too. 

“I will, sir.” 

This was very, very different this way, being alone with him, being half-dressed but so naked. It was both easier and more frightening, here in this normal room in this normal bed. He was braced for intolerable pain, but Kaltherzig examined him almost gently at first, cupping him and pressing with his fingertips. Measuring me.

A slow pull, until long after he was gasping and keening, shaking harder with the effort of staying in that position. This was a new hurt, with notes of outrage from internal structures that were not pleased about being rearranged and stretched. 

Kaltherzig said, “That's beautiful,” and Erich realized the doctor meant, him, and felt himself go cold and then warm all over. 

“Breathe. And cry out all you want to—there's no one to hear you but me, this time—but keep your knees under you.”

He drew in his breath. He was waiting for that unspeakable pain to crash into him again, but what happened was like more of being examined, pushes and pulls that were at first distressingly pleasant, and then faintly uncomfortable. Kaltherzig led him this way, slowly and steadily. He didn't realize the doctor had begun to hurt him at all until he'd been doing it for a long time. The climb from worry to anguish was easier that way, and that was the trap. 

He sounded very loud to himself, with night and house so empty around them. He kept his knees under him, though his feet came up once and his head came up once. Kaltherzig had pushed him back into position without ever letting go of his balls, without a word. He wanted to beg him to stop, but he was afraid he'd land on a no and find himself in Block 10, wishing he was still being treated as gently as this.

Kaltherzig didn't stop until long after Erich had lost his erection. When Erich was quiet enough to hear him, he said, “There must be so many things I could make you like. Let's see if this is one of them.” 

He let go, and that was when Erich came the closest to falling over. He wanted to cough, but coughing would lead to gagging and he wasn't sure he'd be able to stop that if he started. His instinct kept trying to sneak around his orders, and his arms or his hands would twitch with the need to reach between his own legs. This, too, he was fairly sure he wouldn't stop if he started.

Here, at last, was the sound of the drawer opening, Here was the little click of the jar, and here were Kaltherzig's hands again. He was really beginning to think he might be spread and probably hurt and then, possibly, fucked, after all of this storm and stress. The idea of it made a low slow throb roll through his stomach. It was a soft bright thread of want through the pressure and nausea. He sniffled and panted and hid his wet face. Kaltherzig nudged his knees further apart, and that sent a delicious gleaming pang through him again. It made him arch his back, and Kaltherzig laughed. “Not yet.” 

Erich made a noise he couldn't help, frustration and despair, and only got more laughter in return. “Beautiful,” Kaltherzig said again, and wrapped one warm, greased hand around Erich's cock. It confused him, and then silenced him. He didn't expect his erection to return, and when it did Kaltherzig settled into a regular stroke until Erich was rocking helplessly against his hand. 

Faster. Tighter. 

He was keening in his throat when Kaltherzig leaned close to his ear, “Do you want me to do it again?”

He didn't. He almost shook his head, but the fear that this too was a no stopped him. He wanted Kaltherzig to keep doing that delicious, tugging slide around his cock, preferably while over him, inside him, but it didn't occur to him to say this. He could say _yes_ now, or Kaltherzig would make him say it soon enough. 

That was all there was to it. 

That was the world. 

Kaltherzig added his thumbnail to the equation, grazing the head of Erich's cock with each stroke, delicious, maddening. 

“Yes! Yes. Do it again. Just don't stop.” 

He thought, _this is the real, everything before was the dream._

Kaltherzig didn't stop. He stroked Erich's scrotum, one ticklish line with the backs of his fingers, and took it in his hand again. And here was the sudden crushing pain he'd expected, and the unbearable reptilian instinct to fight, with kicks or blows, or to flee, which was impossible. 

He would lose his erection again, and Kaltherzig would let go. That was the game. Any second now. 

Any second failed to arrive, and he couldn't breathe, and he was trying for _please please please_ but the tiny raw hurt of that thumbnail wouldn't let him speak. He shook his head then, violently, vehemently, and Kaltherzig rolled his balls tighter in his hand, making him howl. 

“When you come, and not before.”

This drove Erich into a heartbroken wail. The cruelty of it filled him with a horror that was almost indignation. Surely that had to be impossible. He tried to cry out something along these lines and could not. His testicles would be ruined, he was certain of it, and he tried to rock against Kaltherzig's hand again in desperation, but the pain was keeping his body tremor-tight, clumsy and perilous. 

Kaltherzig let him breathe again, easing his grip until blinding became merely intolerable, merciless hand missing not a beat. When he could speak he eventually started saying, “I can't, sir, I can't, I promise, I'm sorry,” in no particular order. 

“Oh, yes, you can. Just nowhere near as soon as you'd like to.”

“I need you inside me.” 

He didn't think about it, or intend to say anything like it. There wasn't enough of himself left for anything as complex as that. There was only the intensely sweet, raw little scratch of Kaltherzig's thumbnail, drawing out each word. He expected a laugh, or a blow, or worse. 

The doctor took away both of his hands, making a sound between a hiss and a snarl. He left Erich bereft for brief distressing seconds, and then he felt himself seized, swarmed. It was more collision than embrace. Kaltherzig crushed him down flat on the bed, a nightmare of breath and noise in his ear. He'd forgotten about the belt and the bruises until Kaltherzig grasped his ass in both hands, spread him hard, shoved at him harder with his cock until he was inside after four savage thrusts. He dragged at Erich until he was up on his knees again, spidered his arms around his waist. Here were the hands, back again, and the pleasure of it was so sharp and sudden that he tried to pull away from it, and only succeeded in impaling himself more utterly. 

He said _yes,_ again, over and over, for as long as he could. 

Kaltherzig was right. It took forever. He finally realized Kaltherzig was doing it on purpose, playing him, concentrating on his cock until he was close and begging, and then his balls until he was hysterical. And then back again. Kaltherzig wouldn't move his hips, only pinning him there, impaled, though the noise and the motion of Erich's anguished struggle around him made his breath come faster and faster. Erich knew there was yet another magick word to change this, and he was sure with sick certainty that he knew what it was. 

He tried _mercy_ first, and this got him bitten between shoulder and neck, a deep hard bite that Kaltherzig held. Kaltherzig had never done that before, and it made him scream in startled fear with flickers of fairy-tale wolves in his head. He tried to duck away from those teeth, and discovered how trapped he was, pain or pleasure in every direction. After that it came almost naturally to say it. 

“Harder...” 

He was saying it for a long time before he realized Kaltherzig couldn't hear him, and he dragged his face up and said, “Harder, do it harder,” and that was the end of Kaltherzig's heartless stillness, and the end of magick words.

 

He wept, pinned, and when Kaltherzig got off him he finally curled up, cupped his balls with both hands, let himself gasp and shudder and writhe. Kaltherzig made sure he was firmly on one side, ordered him _not_ to roll over on his back, and left him, walking out into the hallway with his pants still unbuttoned. He returned with a towel around a surgical glove filled with snow and persuaded Erich to modify his cupping behavior to include the ice pack. 

Then he sat behind him, stroking down his spine, over and over with one sticky hand. It almost felt affectionate, and for some reason this made Erich cry harder.

 

The next morning he taught Erich how to set up the chess pieces, the phonograph warbling softly behind them. 

It wasn't his fault. It was all his fault.

It was the whim of a god.

**Author's Note:**

> Would you like a free copy of the completed novel? 
> 
> I'll trade a digital copy of the entire novel for a review (pretty much anywhere you'd like to leave one, Amazon preferred) just drop me an email, dears: thenineteen@hotmail.com
> 
> I like to talk to readers. You're welcome to reach me all sorts of ways:  
> thenineteen.net  
> darkmaestro19.tumblr.com/  
> facebook.com/darkmaestro19  
> Be well and have fun.


End file.
